Quickie question

[Allen]

On Saturday 17 October 2009 02:52:56 am Tony Theodore wrote:
*Snipped for politeness*

> OK, so if you have a look at the contents of
> ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/ports/i386/, it seems 7.1 packages
> are no longer being built. Not sure there's much you can do apart from
> using ports or upgrading.


Hey,

Thanks for letting me know about that. I didn't know. I heard the other day on 
here that 7.1 had a longer life cycle than 7.2 so I hadn't upgraded as I 
planned on waiting for 8.0, but I guess it's time to just go ahead and 
upgrade.

I'm still getting used to FreeBSD's update VS upgrade style, because even 
though I've had FreeBSD since 4.0, I would usually set up a machine running 
it and then use it for fun projects to toy with, but didn't ever set up 
servers on it because I was confused for a long time on how you did security 
patching. This was mostly because I came from a very Linux oriented 
background in computing (I've only had a computer for... Well since 1999, so 
I'm by no means a guru at anything) but on Linux and Windows, you just 
install patches and that's it, and on Linux for example; You just download a 
patch as a security fix, install or update the thing, and you're done.

Slackware is what I run on my main FTP server, and there, I use Swaret now, 
but before I'd just use wget to grab a new tgz package, and use upgradepkg to 
get the machine patched, so when I got to FreeBSD patches, I was very 
confused because I couldn't figure out why freebsd-update didn't patch opera 
lol.

Yea I know, stupidity lol. Then I realized that freebsd-update did EXACTLY 
what it was supposed to do, updating the base system, and that all those 
things were ports, and I needed to update THOSE to fix those security holes. 
So now I was like OK, I'll update the base with freebsd-update, and then when 
I go and get new ports, I can use portsnap and portupdate / upgrade... And I 
was like wow, I can just cd into the ports directory and build them, neat!

So it's been a learning experience, but at the same time, I took so much 
longer than I should have, I felt pretty stupid when I realized what I was 
doing wrong.

Is there a configuration file somewhere that pkg_add checks? I mean I know 
there has to be one somewhere... Couldn't I change the server listed to use 
one on freebsd.org/ports ? That way I could still install packages with it?

Anyway, thanks very much for all the help everyone! I'm going to probably 
upgrade, just got a lot of back ups to get done because I was using it as a 
secondary FTP server too heh.

-Allen