Question about packages installed via `pkg_add -r`

[Marin Atanasov Nikolov]

On Sun, Mar 6, 2011 at 8:08 PM, Clifton Royston <cliftonr at lava.net> wrote:
> On Sun, Mar 06, 2011 at 03:06:28PM +0100, Greg Byshenk wrote:
>> On Sun, Mar 06, 2011 at 10:09:17AM +0800, Yue Wu wrote:
>> > ports with portmaster makes pkg installation mangement be much more
>> > flexiable and more friendly than package by pkg_add -r on FreeBSD,
>> > except that ports take much more time and resource. After trying with
>> > packages, I think I have to stick to ports.
>>
>> As suggested by some of the other comments, you can choose to use
>> portmaster with packages, if you prefer not to do local builds.
>>
>> In my own case, I use ports and packages, via portmaster. That is,
>> I use one machine to build locally-configured packages (in some
>> cases with non-standard options), and then install them on the rest
>> of the machines as packages. It works very well in my environment.
>
>  I second this approach if you are managing more than one machine.
> Once I got this approach working, we used to do this when I was working
> on a spam filtering solution, and also at my ISP.  It greatly
> simplifies and reduces the time spent managing a multi-machine
> environment; it works even better when you're handling steps like
> deploying from a test environment into a production environment.  You
> can even go a step further to define and create your own packages
> containing sets of configuration files you want to deploy in
> conjunction with the binaries.
>

I would go even further improving that setup and make a fully
automated environment using something like this:

[ VCS ] ---> [ Cfengine 2/3 Server ]
                /       |        \
               /        |         \
              /         |          \
       [ System 1 ] [ System 2 ] [ System N ]

Somewhere in the above picture we have as well Tinderbox'es building
our packages and uploading them to a local FTP server.

When you need to upgrade a package on multiple (or even all)
systems/jails, you just update the Cfengine 2/3 configuration and
that's all.

This would greatly reduce the time and effort to keep your systems updated.

Regards,
Marin

>  -- Clifton
>
> --
>    Clifton Royston  --  cliftonr at iandicomputing.com / cliftonr at lava.net
>       President  - I and I Computing * http://www.iandicomputing.com/
>  Custom programming, network design, systems and network consulting services
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-- 
Marin Atanasov Nikolov

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