building a distribution server

[Roland Smith]

On Fri, Apr 04, 2008 at 10:23:24PM -0400, Steel City Phantom wrote:
> i have about 10 production servers that i want to upgrade to bsd 7 and
> update all their ports in one shot.  the problem is the down time.  im
> wrapping up upgrading a 6.3 to 7 and its taken over 7 hours so far.  thats
> way too long for our machines to be down.
 
First you need to rebuild one server, which you already seem to have done.

If your servers all use the same kernel, you can use tar(1) and nc(1) to
copy /usr/src and /usr/obj to all machines, and run 'make
installkernel' and 'make installworld' locally. Wether you can copy /etc
and thus avoid mergemaster depends if you have large local configuration
differences between the servers. 

If your servers don't use the same kernel, you can copy /usr/src, and
you'll have to rebuild the kernels locally.

Ports is somewhat easier. Build one machine with all the ports you need,
and use tar and nc again to distribute /usr/local, /var/db/ports and
/var/db/pkg to all machines. 

Roland
-- 
R.F.Smith                                   http://www.xs4all.nl/~rsmith/
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