Date: Tue, 30 Mar 2004 15:47:51 +0100 From: Matthew Seaman <m.seaman@infracaninophile.co.uk> To: "Yaraghchi, Stephan" <stephan.yaraghchi@boerse-berlin-bremen.de> Cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: list patches Message-ID: <20040330144751.GB91038@happy-idiot-talk.infracaninophile.co.uk> In-Reply-To: <AB554A75C8188E4C82FFB072E76E2C1E2234F5@BER-DCM-02.corp.berliner-boerse.de> References: <AB554A75C8188E4C82FFB072E76E2C1E2234F5@BER-DCM-02.corp.berliner-boerse.de>
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--wq9mPyueHGvFACwf Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable On Tue, Mar 30, 2004 at 04:20:57PM +0200, Yaraghchi, Stephan wrote: > I'm wondering if there's an easy way to list all > the patches already applied to a FreeBSD box. Err -- no. FreeBSD doesn't really work that way. You sound as if you're used to, say, Solaris where there is a system of vendor-produced binary patches and the scripting interface to manage them. While there is http://www.daemonology.net/ there is no official FreeBSD project binary patch system at the moment. FreeBSD does things differently. The primary means of getting updates to the system is to pull down updates to the source code and recompile. There are several ways of doing that, all described in the Handbook: http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/mirrors.html (especially the section on CVSup which is what most people would use.) In general then the way you'ld characterise the state of the system is to note the time at which you last synchronised your sources against the FreeBSD CVS repository, and which CVS tag you used. There are certain cases which can be described in a more-or-less shortcut manner: those are (a) using one of the releases installed straight =66rom CD, which is refered to as eg. 5.2.1-RELEASE or (b) tracking one of the -RELEASE CVS branches, eg. RELENG_5_2 -- in this case every time a patch is applied the system version as returned by 'uname -r' will indicate a "patch level" eg. 5.2.1-RELEASE-p4. However, you can manually apply the same patches (as directed in the accompanying security advisory) and recompile just the affected part of the system. This gets your system to exactly the same state as tracking the release branch, except that the various version numbers don't get updated. That doesn't count any other sort of ad-hoc patches or local customizations which may have been applied. Neither does it deal with 3rd party software (but see pkg_info(1) for how to deal with that). In short, the most effective way to learn everything you need to know about the state of a FreeBSD box is to ask the person doing the system administration. Cheers, Matthew --=20 Dr Matthew J Seaman MA, D.Phil. 26 The Paddocks Savill Way PGP: http://www.infracaninophile.co.uk/pgpkey Marlow Tel: +44 1628 476614 Bucks., SL7 1TH UK --wq9mPyueHGvFACwf Content-Type: application/pgp-signature Content-Disposition: inline -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.2.4 (FreeBSD) iD8DBQFAaYiXdtESqEQa7a0RArlvAKCYt+7AZBzjx7SsZLmIPW6t5gRT8gCggukM t6jXGAYR6TmgJcp71x1pTXE= =Vyr/ -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- --wq9mPyueHGvFACwf--
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