03 March 2009 18:11 - During the last past months I have migrated from a FreeBSD 5.2 server to a FreeBSD 7.1 server. This also meant I had to migrate my jails to the new FreeBSD 7.1 machine. To save time compiling the same ports over and over again I created a package building jail, which contains all the generic packages for my jails. In this post a quick overview of the settings I made to get this working.

In the build jail I first installed portupgrade from the ports to make it easier to upgrade ports. After this I made the following setting in /etc/make.conf.

This indicates that all packages should be created in the /packages directory. That being the location where I keep my packages on this host. Besides setting this in /etc/make.conf I also have to set this in /usr/local/etc/pkgtools.conf. This can be done by making sure the PACKAGES environment variable is set in this file. I.e.

After this I just had to install all the base packages with make package-recursive. Upgrading of the packages can now be done with portupgrade -vrRap to make sure packages are being build during the upgrade process.

To allow the other jails and other machine I have exported the /packages directory on the build host as http://buildhost/packages

Configuring the clients is now straight forward in fact. In the /usr/local/etc/pkgtools.conf on the other jails I just had to set the PKG_SITES variable. I.e.

After this upgrading of the packages on the client jails can easily be done with portupgrade -avRrP. Or you can set the USE_PKGS_ONLY option in the pkgtools.conf file to specify the packages that only should be installed/upgraded from a package.

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