freebsd-update, fetch once upgrade many machines

[Paul Schenkeveld]

On Fri, Aug 19, 2011 at 04:10:30PM +0200, Paul Schenkeveld wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Is it possible to fetch files needed for freebsd-update once and put
> them on a local fileserver to update many machines?

Thanks for the pointers on how to set up my own build servers for
freebsd-update but I'm not really interested in building locally, I
just want to mirror the releases and patches that we're interested in
locally and point freebsd-update at my local mirror.

Meanwhile I've been reading parts of the freebsd-update script to see
how updates are distributed.  It looks like stuff gets moved around in
/var/db/freebsd-update during the whole process and what exactly gets
downloaded depends on what's installed on the machine fetching the files.

Ideally I'd like to be able to do something like:

    'wget -r http://update.freebsd.org/x.y-RELEASE/amd64'

to fill my cache, even if x.y is a lower release number than the current
release that my mirror server runs at, i.e. on a 8.2-R server I'd like
to mirror updates for servers I'd like to upgrade from 7.2 to 7.4.

> The reason for asking is that all these machines are on secure
> networks and are not allowed to have Internet access but can all
> access a common fileserver (using FTP, HTTP, SSH but not NFS).
> 
> I can safely assume that all these machines run the same version of
> FreeBSD, installed from binary distributions, GENERIC kernel and only
> upgraded using freebsd-update.

Thanks,

Paul Schenkeveld