Ports Base

[Ryan Thompson]

Lonnie Santella wrote to hogsett at csl.sri.com:

> That's a good point, but I don't make a practice of running NFS, and
> often the servers are at different locations - not connected via any
> network.
>
> So would I be correct in assuming that I would copy the entire
> contents beginning at the /usr/ports level and all subdirectories?

Sure. That will gain you the benefits of an up-to-date ports tree. It's
important that you do this before any ports are installed on the system,
though, or you'll likely have consistency and dependency issues. Once
you start installing ports, you have the pkgdb to deal with.

Personally, I would just use once fast/well-connected machine to keep
everything up to date and build packages for all of the ports you need.
Then, just copy those packages and their recursive dependencies (via CD,
or ftp/sftp/scp).  It's a *lot* less to transfer and maintain.

I use something like this to rapidly deploy new FreeBSD servers. Within
about 40 minutes from an empty RAID array, I can have a fully-configured
environment, the latest RELENG_4_9 (or 4_10 now), up-to-date ports, with
our own base ports already installed. We do use NFS and a cvsup server
to make life easy, but, in cases where I've done this remotely, I only
had to modify a few processes to make it work over SSH. Due to network
and system speeds, it took longer than 40 minutes (2-3 hours the last
time I tried.  The client bought me steak and a pint of beer at a local
restaurant while we waited), but it was still just one "make all" once
I got the first root prompt after the FTP install.

- Ryan

-- 
  Ryan Thompson <ryan at sasknow.com>

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