Upgrade without Internet access
Mark Tinka
mark at tinka.africa
Sun Oct 3 15:24:06 UTC 2021
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.
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