Fast releases demand binary updates.. (Was: Release schedule for 2006 )

[Brian Candler]

On Fri, Dec 23, 2005 at 09:51:15AM +0100, Patrick M. Hausen wrote:
> Any suggestions for an alternative to NFS if your 'client' servers
> are located "all over the world" and you want to installworld across
> the Internet? I was planning to use NFS/TCP secured by IPSec transport
> mode, but anything less complicated would be greatly appreciated ;-)
> 
> Anyone using ggated/ggatec for that purpose?

I think that would not work unless you had a second FreeBSD installation on
the remote machine and rebooted into that while you were upgrading the
first. That's because you can't safely modify a block filesystem while it's
mounted by someone else (even read-only).

You could try tunneling NFS/TCP through ssh port forwarding. Never tried it
myself, and there may be some gotchas.

Linux has an extremely neat solution for this (sshfs) but I don't know of
anything comparable in the BSD world. sshfs uses 'Fuse', a plug-in
architecture which allows filesystems to run in userland. I believe it makes
an sftp connection to the remote host, and then exposes it as if it were a
real filesystem.

Regards,

Brian.