best way to update ports

[Boris Samorodov]

On Thu, 11 Oct 2007 01:33:43 -0400 Bill Stwalley wrote:

> I need your advice on how to update security patches for ports on a dozen
> servers with minimal efforts.

> As I gathered, I should run portaudit in cron jobs and then manually update
> the ports with vulnerabilities after reading UPDATING.  Is this the best
> way?  Is this manual way feasible for managing a dozen servers?

> I used to run portupgrade in cron jobs, but that created too much
> nightmare.  For example, imap-uw broke for a few days recently.

> Someone recommended
> http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/small-lan.html .
> It's great for maintaining machines with identical ports installed, but not
> good when ports are installed with different options on different servers.

You may be interested in ports-mgmt/tinderbox. It let you package
ports for different FreeBSD versions (jails in terms of tinderbox)
and for different portstrees and options at a single machine.

Then you may do a "portupgrade -PP" for the needed ports.


WBR
-- 
Boris Samorodov (bsam)
Research Engineer, http://www.ipt.ru Telephone & Internet SP
FreeBSD committer, http://www.FreeBSD.org The Power To Serve