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A number of the applications on the FreeBSD mail/web server, crimson, were significantly out of date. Not the applications, such as apache or sendmail that were exposed to the outside world, but the applications used internally. Since crimson has a lowly 120MHz Pentium, performing a ports-based (i.e. source) upgrade via portupgrade would take far too long.
Portupgrade offers a binary-only upgrade option via the -PP
command argument, which locates and downloads pre-compiled packages
from a FreeBSD FTP site. Portupgrade uses the ports tree
to determine the version of the latest packages required. On trying
this approach, I found that portupgrade was unable to locate any of
the up-to-date packages. This seemed to be because portupgrade was
looking for the packages in directories named:
ftp://ftp.uk.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/ports/i386/packages-4.10-release/All ftp://ftp.uk.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/ports/i386/packages-4.10-release/Latest
As far as I can tell, these are the locations where the binary packages were placed at the time of the 4.10 release. The latest set of packages, related to the current state of the ports tree can be found in:
ftp://ftp.uk.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/ports/i386/packages-4-stable/All ftp://ftp.uk.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/ports/i386/packages-4-stable/Latest
I needed to tell portupgrade to use the stable FTP directories.
First, I tried setting the OS_PKGBRANCH variable in the
/usr/local/etc/pkgtools.conf file to "4-stable". This had
absolutely no effect. Delving into the portupgrade code, I
discovered that portupgrade used uname to identify the
running FreeBSD version. The documentation for uname,
indicated that it was possible to control its output by setting
environment variables. To persuade portupgrade that it was running
on a stable branch, I set the environment variable UNAME_r
to 4.10-STABLE, prior to running portupgrade.
This had the desired effect, and portupgrade -aPP was able
to find most of the packages related to the current ports tree.
In summary, the commands necessary to perform a binary upgrade of the installed ports on a 4.10 FreeBSD system are as follows:
$ su [root password] # setenv UNAME_r "4.10-STABLE" # portupgrade -aPP
The -PP argument is likely to leave a number of ports
un-upgraded, as the packages are not available. It's probably best
to use the -P argument, as this will compile from ports
when a package is not available.
If you want to run an upgrade via portupgrade without any
user interaction, you need to set the argument BATCH=yes in
the /usr/local/etc/pkgtools.conf file. Note that the
MAKE_ARGS array also includes an option to compile sendmail
without IPV6 support (to workaround the broken DNS in the Alcatel
Speedtouch router - see this).
MAKE_ARGS = {
'*' => 'BATCH=yes',
'mail/sendmail => 'SENDMAIL_WITHOUT_IPV6=yes'
}
While the portupgrade suite is extremely useful, there is
something I wanted to add: an ability to find out what packages
and/or ports would also need to be installed to support a newly
installed package. I wrote portquery to satisfy this need.
Here's the source code. It's my
first ruby program, so it's pretty clunky. It also needs
portupgrade to be installed, as it uses a lot of
features offered by the package.
A more recent version of portupgrade made the decision that
any custom MAKE_ARGS in the /usr/local/etc/pkgtools.conf
file meant that ports should be used instead of packages, unless the
port name was defined in the USE_PKGS_ONLY array. That is, the
-P argument was ignored because I had specified
BATCH=yes in MAKE_ARGS.
While there might be good reasons for this decision in general, it
doesn't make much sense when the only MAKE_ARGS setting for a port is
BATCH=yes. To work around this, I removed the
BATCH=yes from /usr/local/etc/pkgtools.conf and
added it to /etc/make.conf, which contains all the local
make defaults.
The above investigation had the side-effect of clearing up my hazy view of how the various tools related to ports and packages were connected.
The ports tree contains a file called INDEX, which records all the
information related to all the ports. This information is sourced
from the ports themselves, and hence, as ports are modified, the INDEX
file becomes out of date. This is because the INDEX file on cvsup
servers is only updated once a week or so (that's what the man page
for portsdb says).
It's possible to rebuild the local INDEX file by:
cd /usr/ports make index
However, on my server this can take four or five hours to
complete. Using make fetchindex, you can retrieve the
latest pre-built INDEX file, but this (possibly) will not reflect the
current state of your ports tree. It's worked for me, so far.
Portupgrade (and its friends, portsclean and portversion), use a
fast access version of the INDEX file, called INDEX.db. This is
created (and updated) by portsdb -u. It is recommended in
the portsdb manpage to rebuild the INDEX file after every
cvsup, using portsdb -Uu. Remember, the -U option
is the same as make index, and can take an inordinately
long time.
The other key database related to packages is located in
/var/db/pkg/pkgdb.db. This database records information
regarding the packages actually installed on the machine. The
package database is maintained by pkgdb, usually
automatically run by portupgrade as required. It is recommended
that pkgdb -F be run after a binary portupgrade to ensure
all dependencies are recorded properly.
This diagram might be useful to understand the relationships between the various ports and package utilities and their support files.
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