pkg_add on dialup: resume?

[Rocky Borg]

On 8/7/2010 6:03 PM, Douglas A. Tutty wrote:
> However, I'm on dialup.  pkg_add doesn't seem to be able to resume since
> I can't use the phone line (or the computer) long enough to install
> packages all in one go.
>
> Is there a solution to this?
>    


There might be a more elegant solution but this is what I would say 
offhand. All pkg_add is doing is downloading the package from the 
freebsd ftp. It's just doing the behind the scenes stuff of picking 
which package is right for your system. So you could just use an ftp 
client with resume and go to ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/ports/ 
and find the packages you want and que them up in your ftp client. Then 
just do pkg_add /path/to/package when you've finished downloading them.

If you don't use packages I think you can also setup resume if you're 
doing the "make install" method. Find an ftp client you want to use and 
change from using fetch to download source. This post describes setting 
up an ftp client to download using multiple connections but you should 
be able to adapt it for your needs.

http://scratching.psybermonkey.net/2009/09/freebsd-download-ports-simultaneously.html

> I understand that if I go with building from source (both for security
> updates and for third-party apps) the there is a resume function with
> that.  True?  I was hoping to avoid the build-time, and I think it takes
> longer to download source than binary.
>    


If you have an old FreeBSD ISO/CD laying around or someone you know has 
one you could install whatever version of the source you have. The 
handbook describes methods you can use to update your source where you 
only need to download what's different (this also means you don't need 
to download the source all at once).This should limit how much you have 
to download if you have a fairly recent version of FreeBSD and it will 
be pretty easy to then keep updated with minimal downloads in the future.

http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/synching.html