an even dumber q: how do i get sage's ports-ypgrade working?

[Fred Condo]

On Oct 10, 2008, at 4:21 PM, Gary Kline wrote:

>
> 	Late last December my small network began falling apart.  Still
> 	not sure how, but a fellow from Dallas came to my rescue and from
> 	his home, slowly rebuilt and re-configured everything.  E.g.: for
> 	one thing, where I hack sendmail working via various kludges, he
> 	set up imap.  I had thought that was mostly for students....
>
> 	He also filled me in on jails.  Previously, I had my 1998 Kayak
> 	doing DNS and mail and web solo.  Jon created a jail and set
> 	things up there.  He used NFS to bring over things from a faster
> 	computer.  That's well and good; it makes sense to compile a
> 	suite that takes days on sage [Kayak @ 400MHz] on my Dell8200
> 	[2.4GHZ].  A few days ago I realized that I was missing some
> 	simple programs on sage.  I went into ports: empty.  Years ago
> 	there was a standalone script that let you fix or tune things.
> 	I thought it was on the hard drive as well as the CD set.
>
> 	Anybody?
>
> 	thanks for any clues!
>
> 	gary
>
>
>
> --  
> Gary Kline  kline at thought.org  http://www.thought.org  Public  
> Service Unix
>        http://jottings.thought.org   http://transfinite.thought.org

You don't mention which version of FreeBSD you're using, but if it's  
at all recent, portsnap is your friend:

# mkdir -p /usr/ports && portsnap fetch extract # Do this once to  
fetch and set up the ports collection initially

Then add this to root's crontab:
1 3 * * * /usr/sbin/portsnap cron update

If portsnap is not on your system, you should probably upgrade, but  
you could try the packagge:
# pkg_add -r portsnap

Also, if you're administering a bunch of jails, ezjail is also your  
friend. See http://erdgeist.org/arts/software/ezjail/ (website is a  
bit out of date; 3.0 is released and in the ports collection).