BSD Hacks

Chapter 8. Keeping Up-to-Date

Introduction

One of the distinguishing characteristics of the BSDs is the ease with which you can keep your operating system source and installed software up-to-date. In fact, each of the BSDs provides multiple alternatives, allowing users to choose the approaches that best match their time and bandwidth requirements.

This chapter provides a plethora of ways to maintain an updated system. While many are written from the FreeBSD perspective, don’t let that stop you from hacking your own customized NetBSD or OpenBSD solutions. In fact, this chapter concludes with one user demonstrating how to enjoy the benefits of the BSD ports and packages collections on Mac OS X!

Automated Install

If you’re responsible for installing multiple systems, hopefully you’ve discovered the art of automating installs.

Most operating systems have some sort of scripting mechanism that allows you to predefine the answers to the questions asked by the install program. Once you’ve started the actual install, you can leave and return to a fully installed system. The alternative is to sit there, answering every prompt when it appears. No, thank you!

Even as a home user, it’s well worth your while to spend a few minutes customizing the install script that comes with FreeBSD. Try this hack once and you’ll never want to sit and watch an install again.

Preparing the Install Script

Before installing any system, you need to know the following:

• The IP settings and hostname of the host ...