(de)centralized ports management with portsnap

[RW]

On Fri, 25 Oct 2013 12:32:24 -0700
David Newman 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.


The easiest way to do it is just to point them all to the same local
http cache. If you set http_proxy and/or HTTP_PROXY in the the
environment portsnap will use them to seed it's random choice of mirror
so that all your servers will use consistent urls.


On Sat, 26 Oct 2013 08:27:51 +0100
Steve O'Hara-Smith wrote:

> 	Why not just NFS mount the ports directory from a designated
> ports box ?

Note that it's possible to use the same /var/db/portsnap/ to manage
multiple trees.