So we’ve all probably blindly followed the directions of one tutorial or another at some point in time. Whether it was for some programming technique or to get a mail server up and running. Have you ever stopped to think about how damaging the tutorial could be if it contained wrong information?
Any FreeBSD user that utilizes the ports system should be reading /usr/ports/UPDATING after every ports tree update and certainly before they update any port. It amazes me the number of problems people encounter that could be easily answered or avoided if they just grepped through that file for the name of the port they were having trouble with.
Unless you run absolutely nothing on your server, from time to time something is going to need to be patched because of a vulnerability. Yes, it happens. As much as you 'my system is better than yours and never has any vulnerabilities' guys don't want to admit, these things were written by humans and we aren't perfect. I used to dread the email into my inbox from the FreeBSD Security mailing list. I knew that it meant I had a bit of work ahead of me compiling new software or other tasks that I cared not waste my time on. That's why I am happy that a utility, written by Colin Percival, exists to make my life easier. It's name is freebsd-update.
Over time you are bound to have ports installed that you no longer need. These may be things that you installed and no longer use, or ports that were depended on by another and remain after you have removed the parent port. No matter how they get there, after some length of time you are bound to have ports installed that you no longer need. A quick and easy way to identify ports that are not depended upon by other ports is to use pkg-orphan.
Are you tired of seeing the exact same output from all your periodic scripts? If you are like me, looking at the exact same output day after day becomes very tedious and you can allow items to slip past you as you just casually glimpse over the periodic emails. Luckily, there is a solution that will allow you to see only the important information. Its name is swatch.
Today I'm going to share with you the quick and easy way to keep your ports tree updated in FreeBSD. We'll also look at updating the ports themselves.
The first thing you need to do is make sure you have the cvsup and portupgrade utilities installed. You can find them at /usr/ports/net/cvsup-without-gui and /usr/ports/sysutils/portupgrade. Now that you have made sure those are installed, you need to create a ports-supfile. I like to keep mine at /usr/local/etc/ports-supfile, so I'll assume you will keep yours there as well. Fire up your favorite editor and edit the file to look like:
Matt Wade: Matt is an Editor and technical reviewer of several different titles.
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