Brett Glass <brettlariat.org> writes:

| Alas, this is not an acceptable solution.
|
| I realize that many people use FreeBSD on non-mission-critical systems, or to
| tinker with, and can afford downtime. But we need to create and maintain
| production machines.
|
| I hope that you can understand that doing a CVSup and then rebuilding the
| world every night (slowing the system to a crawl in the process and creating
| a system which might or might not be 100% stable) is not an acceptable
| solution.

Actually, it's not as bad as it might seem. I suspect what's got you upset is
the thought of having to do a make buildworld on every machine. I can tell you
how to avoid that.

What I've done in the past is to use NFS to export /usr from my fastest
machine. Let's assume you want to keep a Class C network at 192.168.3.0
updated.

        /etc/exports:

            /usr -alldirs -maproot=0:10 -network 192.168.3 -mask 255.255.255.0

Then, on the machines you want to keep updated, you'd mount /usr/src and
/usr/obj from that build machine.

Now, on the fast box, type

        # cd /usr/src
        # make buildworld

Churn, churn, churn. None of your production machines are impacted; only the
fast box handling the build.

I should also note that you may want to move *all* your kernel configuration
files over to the fast box, into /sys/i386/conf (if you're running x86/Pentium/
AMD boxes).

Once the build is done, pick a machine you want to update. Let's assume it's
called wibble, and it's kernel configuration file is called WIBBLE.

On the fast box, type

        # make buildkernel KERNCONF=WIBBLE

Once that's done, go to Wibble, shut down the services on it (what you want to
do is essentially bring it down to single-user mode, but still keep NFS
running), and type the following:

        # cd /usr/src
                (Remember, that's the directory that actually resides on the
                 fast box)
        # make installworld
                (Which installs the new operating system.)
        # make installkernel KERNCONF=WIBBLE
                (Which installs the new kernel.)
        # reboot

You should be done at this point with wibble. Next machine, wobble. Go to the
fastbox and type

        # make buildkernel KERNCONF=WOBBLE

and when that's done, go to wobble and type

        # cd /usr/src
        # make installworld
        # make installkernel KERNCONF=WOBBLE
        # reboot

and so on.

You'll find that's a LOT faster than rebuilding the entire OS from source on
each and every machine.

Hope that helps. If you have any questions . . . well, you know where to
write. :)

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