From owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Tue Mar 2 16:41:35 2004 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id D110B16A4CE for ; Tue, 2 Mar 2004 16:41:35 -0800 (PST) Received: from rtfm.spawar.navy.mil (rtfm.spawar.navy.mil [198.253.71.162]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 8A69943D2F for ; Tue, 2 Mar 2004 16:41:33 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from lee@slaughters.com) Received: from slaughters.com (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by rtfm.spawar.navy.mil (8.12.9/8.12.9) with ESMTP id i230e0YC004640 for ; Tue, 2 Mar 2004 16:40:00 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from lee@slaughters.com) Message-ID: <40452960.1000906@slaughters.com> Date: Tue, 02 Mar 2004 16:40:00 -0800 From: lee slaughter User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; FreeBSD i386; en-US; rv:1.3.1) Gecko/20030524 X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.org Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Subject: production box: 4.9, 5.1, 5.2+ ??? X-BeenThere: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.1 Precedence: list Reply-To: lee@slaughters.com List-Id: User questions List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Wed, 03 Mar 2004 00:41:35 -0000 I hesitate to ask this because it sounds stupid. I went down to the tech book store and bought freeBSD on CD's. it happened to be 5.1. I, a neophyte, assumed it was "kosher". I bought it and installed it on 2 machines and pretty much ok so far. Now I've been reading about the STABLE and CURRENT branches and cvsup and all other kinds of "keeping up". What I want is production boxs with of course bug fix and security upgrades, but not needing always the latest app releases. I've tried to grok the release engineering and all but I don't get it. I'm going to put freeBSD on 2 other machines as well, but don't know whether to install 4.9, use my 5.1 CD's (and then presumably have to go to 5.2 + ??? to keep up?), 5.2 or what. Not to mention the 2 already installed. I want to keep all 4 machines pretty much in synch. thanks for any clarification i can get on: 1. which is best "production" version 2. what is best essential upkeep mechanism (not so much for apps but for bug fixes in OS and security fixes/patches on essential stuff like OpenSsh) thanks much........... lee