freebsd-update's "Fetching patches" phase?

[RW]

On Sat, 13 Aug 2016 12:28:43 +0200
Vlad K. wrote:

> Hello list,
> 
> what's the freebsd-update "Fetching patches" phase for?

That's where the updates are downloaded. 

> I've set up a central reverse proxy cache for all my servers to speed 
> things up, 

See below.

> and looking at how it behaves I've noticed that the
> "Fetching patches" phase is resulting with 404s for each link
> attempted.
> 
> Now, I don't know if this is because it's still not final -RELEASE 
> version,


It might be because of the MITM vulnerability in freebsd-update.


>  but it does look incredibly inefficient. Upgrading from
> -BETA4 to -RC1 queried over 9000 (heh) URLs

It is efficient because it's very heavily pipelined. If your proxy
doesn't have good support for this it could slow things down when the
patch files are first fetched.

If you use a proxy each client should be have HTTP_PROXY set to the
same thing as this is used the seed the random selection of origin
servers. If you intercept the connections it wont cache well.