Fresh binary install

[Roland Smith]

On Tue, Mar 08, 2011 at 02:11:25PM -0600, Chris wrote:
> The goal - to keep this system running with as little intervention as
> possible (I suspect binary updates/upgrades is the way to go since it
> was something that was just starting a few years back). 

Keeping the system itself up to date can be done with freebsd-update(8). But
that will only provide the GENERIC kernel (and modules of course).

A lot of ports are available as packages as well. One caveat is that those
packages are built using the standard options defined per port. If you don't
like those, you'll have to compile yourself. And there are of course ports
that are not available as packages for several reasons.

You can choose to install packages from several directories on the FTP site;
packages-8-stable or packages-8.2-release depending on what you want. The
packages-8.2-release directory is AFAIK a snapshot of packages-8-stable at the
moment 8.2 was released. If you install packages from -release, you'll only
have to update them with a new release. But you won't have the latest and
greatest, and to the best of my knowledge you will not get updated packages if
there are vulnerabilities discovered. OTOH, if you install packages from
packages-8-stable you will have to contend with more frequent updates.

Personally I've built all my ports from source, and I update them every other
week or so using portsnap(8) and portmaster(8). This usually doesn't take
long, nor does it require much interaction. 

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