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Date:      Wed, 26 Jun 2002 13:05:24 -0700 (PDT)
From:      Richard Fairfield <rcf@ms.washington.edu>
To:        FreeBSD-questions@FreeBSD.ORG
Cc:        Richard Fairfield <rcf@ms.washington.edu>
Subject:   maintaining multiple machines
Message-ID:  <Pine.OSF.4.44.0206261246350.418041-100000@entropy.ms.washington.edu>

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Hello all:

A couple of months ago I installed FreeBSD 4.5 on two PCs. Since then,
I've been occasionally using CVSup and portupgrade to keep these machines
up to date, tracking RELENG_4. Here's my general proceedure:

	run cvsup
	"make buildworld"
	make and install a new kernel
	reboot to single-user mode
	"make installworld"
	run mergemaster and deal with a varying number of config files
	back to multi-user mode
	upgrade packages, which itself involves many steps.

I'd now like to run FreeBSD on several more machines, but the above
steps are really quite time consuming, and I don't think that they
scale very well. So, I was hoping to do this work on only one machine
and then use rdist or, perhaps, rsync to keep the other 'n' machines
up to date. The basic plan, patterned after what I've done for years
with other Unix OS's:

	Share /usr/local via NFS
	Share /usr/src via NFS
	Ditribute everything else via rdist (or rsync)
	Perform kernel upgrades manually on each machine

This seems pretty straight-forward. Except that there will be a heck
of a lot of stuff being rdist'd, and I'm a bit concerned about getting
a correct list of things not to rdist. Also, what special issues are
there because of the ports tree, or other unique FreeBSD features?

Anyway, before starting this, I was hoping that others might share
their experience with managing several or many FreeBSD machines.

Thanks, in advance, for any and all comment and suggestions.

Richard Fairfield
Math Sciences Computing Center
University of Washington
MSCC Departmental Telephone Number: 206-616-3636
My Office Telephone Number: 206-685-2303
Fax: 206-685-7419
rcf@ms.washington.edu


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