(de)centralized ports management with portsnap

[illoai at gmail.com]

On 25 October 2013 17:22, David Newman <dnewman at networktest.com> wrote:
> On 10/25/13 2:18 PM, illoai at gmail.com wrote:
>> On 25 October 2013 15:32, David Newman <dnewman at networktest.com> wrote:
>>> I'm setting up a group of FreeBSD servers that use 'portsnap fetch' and
>>> then 'portsnap update' to refresh their ports trees.
>>>
>>> Can I set up a local master to avoid pulling updates multiple times? If
>>> portsnap isn't the right tool for this, what is?
>>>
>>> Apologies if this has been asked before; this seems like a standard
>>> problem, but I didn't see an answer in a web search, the portsnap
>>> manpage, or in the Michael W. Lucas FreeBSD book.
>>
>> It's probably simplest to simply pull with one machine & then use
>> rsync or some such to push the updates out to the client machines
>> which would then run "portsnap update" as needed.
>
> Thanks. What directories would get rsync'd over for the updates? Is it
> really as simple as just copying over /usr/ports to each machine?
>

Distfiles become unwieldy after a while, but, yes, copying /usr/ports
would work fine, as would copying /var/db/portsnap.  I'm not sure
which would have a lower headache factor.  Using rsync to copy
the whole ports tree will involve a lot of checking.  Copying the
portsnap directory, while much lighter/simpler, will involve running
'portsnap update' on each of the machines, though.

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