Various package/ports problems

[Kris Kennaway]

On Sun, Sep 03, 2006 at 05:58:36PM -0700, Dr. Jennifer Nussbaum wrote:
> 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

Why not (in both cases)?

> 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.

You can do an 'upgrade install' from the install media...it's
something you should definitely practise on a local system first
though (not because it's hard, but so you know what you're doing).

Kris
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