From owner-freebsd-questions Wed Jun 26 13:27:26 2002 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from entropy.ms.washington.edu (entropy.ms.washington.edu [128.95.18.1]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id CF52737C753 for ; Wed, 26 Jun 2002 13:05:24 -0700 (PDT) Received: from entropy.ms.washington.edu (entropy.ms.washington.edu [128.95.18.1]) by entropy.ms.washington.edu (8.11.6/8.11.6) with ESMTP id g5QK5Or418735; Wed, 26 Jun 2002 13:05:24 -0700 (PDT) Date: Wed, 26 Jun 2002 13:05:24 -0700 (PDT) From: Richard Fairfield To: FreeBSD-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Cc: Richard Fairfield Subject: maintaining multiple machines Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG 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 To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message