Upgrade without Internet access

[Mark Tinka]

On 10/3/21 17:09, Tim Daneliuk via freebsd-questions wrote:

> 1. Use git to fetch the relevant source tree.  Move this to /usr/src on
>     the target machine and do the required 'mergemaster', 'make kernel',
>     and 'make world' steps outlined in the handbook.  Do this AFTER you
>     have a good system backup, just in case.  You're effectively
>     rebuilding the entire OS and related docs from source.

This was the old way of doing it.

When I got on to FreeBSD, we'd moved on to "freebsd-update" :-). But I 
recall many painful memories of mates going toe-to-toe with "make world".


> 1A. There are binary upgrades for FreeBSD available but I've never
>      used them so I cannot comment on how one might get them for
>      later use elsewhere or whether the will work disconnected from the Net.

"freebsd-update" is pretty good. Been running it for nearly a decade 
now, and it's only gotten better.


>
> 2. You can upgrade ports, but it's a little tricky.  Again, you first
>     use git to get the latest ports tree.  Then you have to get all
>     the source tarballs required to build your ports and put them into
>     /usr/ports/distfiles.  This is painful because of the way ports depend
>     on other ports, so it make take you a while to figure out what the
>     whole set of required tarballs might be.

We use "portsnap" to update the Ports free, and "portmaster" to upgrade 
all affected ports. Is generally reliable; the only issue I've run into 
is if a Port is marked as deprecated, and then some manual work is 
needed. Otherwise, no major drama.


> 3. It might be easier to directly download the required packages, but I've
>     never done that either.

I'm not into the binary package management for FreeBSD. I'm old skool; I 
prefer managing Ports.

That said, I'm not sure I've ever heard anyone running the binary 
packages without Internet.

Mark.