Build Your Own FreeBSD Update Server

Attention: This article will no longer be maintained. If you have any questions, please feel free to mail me. jgh@FreeBSD.org
Please see http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/freebsd-update-server/ for the updated article. It is available in other languages, as well.

Jason Helfman (jgh@FreeBSD.org)

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This article describes building an internal FreeBSD Update Server. The freebsd-update-server software is written by Colin Percival (cperciva@FreeBSD.org); current Security Officer of FreeBSD. For users that think it is convenient to update their systems against an Official Update Server, building their own FreeBSD Update Server may help to extend its functionality by supporting manually-tweaked FreeBSD releases or by providing a local mirror that will allow faster updates for a number of machines.

1. Introduction

Experienced users or administrators responsible for several machines or environments. They understand the difficult demands and challenges of maintaining such an infrastructure. Running a FreeBSD Update Server makes it easier to deploy security and software patches to selected test machines before rolling them out to production. It also means a number of systems can be updated from the local network rather than a much slower Internet connection. This article outlines the steps involved in creating an internal FreeBSD Update Server.

2. Prerequisites

To build an Internal FreeBSD Update Server some requirements should be met.

A running FreeBSD system.

Note: At a minimum, updates require building on a FreeBSD release greater than or equal to the target release version for distribution.

A user account with at least 4 GB of available space. This will allow for creation of updates for 7.1 and 7.2, but the exact space requirements may change from version to version.

An ssh(1) account on a remote machine to upload distributed updates.

A web server, like Apache, with over half of the space required for the build. For instance, our test builds for 7.1 and 7.2 consume a total amount of 4 GB, and the webserver space needed to distribute updates is 2.6 GB.

Basic knowledge of shell scripting with Bourne shell, sh(1).

3. Configuration: Installation & Setup

Download freebsd-update-server software as a tar archive, or use csup( 1) and the projects-all collection.

Update scripts/build.conf appropriately. It is sourced during al build operations.

Here is the default build.conf.default, which should be modified to suit your environment.

 # $FreeBSD: projects/freebsd-update-server/scripts/build.conf,v 1.1 2006/08/31 07:48:40 cperciva Exp $
                      
                       # Main configuration file for FreeBSD Update builds.  The
                       # release-specific configuration data is lower down in
                       # the scripts tree.
                      
                       # Location from which to fetch releases
                       export FTP=ftp://ftp2.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/releases
                      
                       # Host platform
                       export HOSTPLATFORM=`uname -m`
                      
                       # Host name to use inside jails
                       export BUILDHOSTNAME=${HOSTPLATFORM}-builder.daemonology.net
                      
                       # Location of SSH key
                       export SSHKEY=/root/.ssh/id_dsa
                      
                       # SSH account into which files are uploaded
                       MASTERACCT=builder@wadham.daemonology.net
                      
                       # Directory into which files are uploaded
                       MASTERDIR=update-master.freebsd.org

Build Your Own FreeBSD Update Server

1. Introduction

2. Prerequisites

3. Configuration: Installation & Setup

4. Building Update Code

5. Building a Patch

6. Tips

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