Repository availability and security updates for version 11

[James B. Byrne]

On Wed, March 17, 2021 12:51, Guy Noir wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I am working with a team to upgrade our infrastructure to version 12,
> however I have a few questions about the EoL event in September for version
> 11:
>
>
>    1. How long after September 2020 will the version 11 repository remain
>    available?

It will disappear withing days of eol, if not within hours.

>    2. Does the FreeBSD team continue to provide security updates for
>    version 11 after the EoL in September?

No.



A possible solution to 1 is to create your own local repository and populate it
using 'pkg fetch -a -o /path/to/local/repo/All' (man pkg-fetch). Fetch  up to
and including the EoL date and then stop.  You will have all the packages that
were available to 11 at its EoL in  /path/to/local/repo/All/.  You can use pkg
repo (man pkg-repo) to create the pkg infrastructure in /path/to/local/repo/.

A configuration file (local.conf) for the repo needs to be created and placed
in /usr/local/etc/pkg/repos/.  If you are delivering to other systems via
http(s) then naturally you will need an httpd service running on your repo
host.  There are threads discussing this on the forums at freebsd.org.

An alternative is to setup a host as a Poudriere build system and build
packages using a FreeBSD-11 jail (man poudriere-create). Again, you will need
to cutoff source updates when the EoL arrives or Poudriere will happily try to
build packages that cannot succeed on an older architecture.

I have used this method to recreate packages for 10.3 from sources pulled from
svn as of a specific date,  but it was not a pleasant experience.


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James B. Byrne                mailto:ByrneJB at Harte-Lyne.ca
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