Farm synchronization

[Roland Smith]

On Sun, May 02, 2010 at 06:17:34PM +0400, Oleg Lutchenko wrote:
> Hello!
> 
> Is there any regular way to synchronize installed packages in the farm of
> FreeBSD servers quickly.

Forget packages. Here is wat I do to keep the ports on a couple of machines in
sync.

- Ports are built and installed on a single powerfull workstation, the build machine.
- After updating the build machine (using portsnap and portmaster), the
  /usr/local and /var/db/pkg directories from that machine are distributed to
  the dependent machines using rsync(1).
- You may need to exclude /usr/local/etc from rsync, or use a script to change files in
  that directory afterwards to account for different hostnames and or IP
  addresses! I tend to keep config files for every machine in a git
  repository on my workstation, merge any chances from the updates and roll
  them out to the dependent machines.
- Note that if you use ports that install kernel modules, you'll need to sync
  /boot/modules as well!
- On the dependent machines, the /usr/ports directory is removed to save space.

This solution has made my life a lot easier.

You'll have tha same ports installed on all machines. This can be viewed as
making life easier or as a security risk, depending on how you look at it. :-)
But if your thoughts are leaning in the second direction, you can always use a
script to pkg_delete the ports you don't need on specific machines.

Roland
-- 
R.F.Smith                                   http://www.xs4all.nl/~rsmith/
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