I need your FreeBSD Maintenance Strategy Opinions

IT_Architect

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I'm doing a rethink of my FreeBSD installs. That last time was when 7.2 was new. :D There are DirectAdmin programs and pkg/ports. I installed FreeBSD to get Current for both packages and ports because it is the easy and FreeBSD supported automatic way. Now I'm having second thoughts and thinking about using Synth to coordinate ports and packages, and switching to Quarterly for ports and packages by using this script: Quarterly Ports Update Script I would guess DirectAdmin is geared more toward Quarterly than Current. With rolling releases from two sources, and shared binaries, what have you found to be a good strategy to keep everything in sync?

Thanks!

PS: Poudriere is very popular, but I have a few unique servers, and Synth seems simpler and better all-around for that environment. As always, I'm open to your suggestions.
 
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Directadmin manages it's own packages - it is not touching the ports. You can update your ports with Portmaster at anytime and it will not break anything. Or at least I never experienced any issues when updating ports.
 
Directadmin manages it's own packages - it is not touching the ports. You can update your ports with Portmaster at anytime and it will not break anything. Or at least I never experienced any issues when updating ports.
I can't say I've had issues. I have had the situation where FreeBSD updated a shared library, and a DirectAdmin update put it back a point revision. That could potentially be an issue, but admittedly, nothing was ever affected when that happened. I guess I'll just forget about it.

Thanks!
PS: Do you use CURRENT or QUARTERLY?
 
I have two ports that coexist - Curl and Nghttpd. Usually the ports package comes before the update in DA. When I update them in ports, nothing breaks - everything continues to work. The only downside is that when doing ./build versions I have a message "An update is available" (saying that my newer version must be updated to the older one). Just ignore and move on.

* This can be fixed if you delete them from ports but that way you will have issues when updating other ports. The other ports will not see curl despite that it's there (it just not registered in the ports by DA). Therefore when you update them, they will ask you if you want to install curl. You must always skip that with the -i option in portmaster and it's little annoying :)
 
"An update is available...Just ignore"
I have a process that checks every night after backups and gives me a list. When ports were working with 7.2, ignore is what I did too. I was just checking to see if there was something elegant I was missing. Maybe I'll try QUARTERLY.

Thanks!
 
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