clement’s FreeBSD blog

Last tuesday, I finally received few servers. We (my co-worker and I) have wasted 3 days waiting for hardware, sat next to datacenter door, playing Mario Kart DS. We added a new rack and put into it a cisco 2970 switch, 3 HP DL360, and 1 DL380 (all are G4). We configured iLO and went away. Oh, I forgot to tell you we also plugged back our beloved “bob”, our build machine (lame joke, isn’t it?).

I couldn’t resist to play with them.

I wanted to see how FreeBSD-update can deal with branches and not releases, even if it’s not designed for. Important note: I DON’T USE IT IN PRODUCTION IT’S FOR TESTING PURPOSE ONLY. But if it works… why not :-) I won’t describe how to use tinderbox to build packages. It’s quite easy: build packages, build INDEX, create subdirectories in ftp root, copy packages, and it’s done. iLO allows you to grab remote video/keyboard. Perfect to install FreeBSD over PXE, comfortably sat in my working chair.

Here’s what I have:

• a build server with free CPU cycles and disk space
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• an up-to-date copy of FreeBSD CVS
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• test servers
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• few hours
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• coffee, beer and cigarettes
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First part of the job is to make a base release. I decided to use a vanilla release, to avoid conflicts later. Since I want to play with FreeBSD-update, let I make a release just after it gets committed.
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More here... because I didn’t manage to make it look “nice” in wp.