Date: Fri, 6 Nov 2009 12:31:42 -0500 From: Roger <rnodal@gmail.com> To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Help understanding basic FreeBSD concepts (ports, updates, jails) Message-ID: <9d972bed0911060931k4ee2a5b7n9d62db23beeb6367@mail.gmail.com>
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Hello all, I'm coming from Linux and I would appreciate it if I could get some help understanding some basic FreeBSD concepts. Here is the output of 'uname -r' is "7.2-RELEASE-p4". My first concerned is how do I keep FreeBSD up to date. According to the FreeBSD site, the lastest production release is 7.2. Is this the version that is recommended to have in a production server? According to what I have read from the Handbook and searches in google, the way to stay up to date binary wise is to use "freebsd-update", is this correct? I believe freebsd-update will update the base system but not the ports. Please correct me if I'm wrong. My second concerned is the ports. In the file "ports-supfile" there is one option, "*default release=cvs tag=.". I believe this specifies which cvs tag to use when pulling files from the ports. At one point I had "*default release=cvs tag=RELEASE_7_2_0". When I pulled the ports using the "RELEASE_7_2_0" tag and tried to build "portsupgrade" the installation failed because the ruby version that was going to be installed I believe had a security problem. (I love the fact that I was stopped from installing software that is KNOWN to be vulnerable). I figured that maybe I needed to get the latest version. So I went ahead and changed the cvs tag to "." (which I believe means the head version). I updated the ports and then tried the installation again, this time the installation went further but failed again due to the fact that my libtool (I can't remember the exact name) was older than what the installation required. So that threw me off. I believe that libtool is part of the base system and not the ports, correct? So that made me think that maybe because of using the latest version of the ports I can build certain ports if my base is not concurrent (in terms of what the ports requires and what my system offers) with the port system. So my question is this, if my FreeBSD release is 7.2-RELEASE-p4 which tag should I set for the ports system? Should I put the tag "RELEASE_7_2_0" and then wait for a security fix of the particular port (ruby) and then proceed to install? What is the recommended approach if your aim is to have your system up to date and stable? Another question that I have about the port system is, if LibX has a security update (or simply a bug fix) and programs from the ports programA, programB and programC depend on that library what is the recommended way to perform the upgrade that will also handle upgrading those programs? My third item is jails. I currently have only one external IP. I would like to setup two jails, one for apache and the other for postfix. Would that require more external IPs? If I wanted to have ssh access to the host and the jails that would definitely will require 3 external IPs right? Thank you very much for your time and patience, -r
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