Various package/ports problems

[Dr. Jennifer Nussbaum]

Kris Kennaway <kris at obsecurity.org> wrote: On Mon, Aug 28, 2006 at 01:59:14PM -0700, Dr. Jennifer Nussbaum wrote:

>> I wish i could, but i dont have physical access to the machine - its
>> in a remote location with no serial console. So if anything gets 
>> messed up during an upgrade, im in a hell of a lot of trouble.
> 
>> I dont know when i'll be able to fix this problem so until i can upgrade
>> the OS i at least want to keep the rest of it up to date.

>The packages are compiled for 4.11-stable and do not work >with systems
>much older than this (e.g. 4.8, as you discovered).  You might >have
>more luck compiling from the ports collection, although that >too only
>supports 4.11 officially (and modern releases, of course).
Thanks, i CAN compile from the ports collection (i never wanted to use
 packages). Its MANAGING this that i cant do. I can update my ports tree
fine, and i can go into ports directory and do a make install, sure.

But i cant do portsversion to see what needs updating, and i cant do
pkg_info to find out what versions i have. So doing something like
upgrading Perl and all it's dependencies--wow what a nightmare that
would be.

But for another way of fixing the problem, is there any trustworthy
way i can do a clean install of 6.1 on a box i dont have access to? I
can backup everything offsite and ship a CD or an external drive to
the facility, if there is some way i can be assured of getting back into
the box after some install procedure is run by a tech there.

Jen

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