7 Tips

• If a custom release is built using the native make release procedure, freebsd-update-server code will work from your release. As an example, a release without ports or documentation can be built by clearing functionality pertaining to documentation subroutines findextradocs (), addextradocs () and altering the download location in fetchiso (), respectively, in scripts/build.subr. As a last step, change the sha256(1) hash in build.conf under your respective release and architecture and you are ready to build off your custom release.

  # Compare ${WORKDIR}/release and ${WORKDIR}/$1, identify which parts
      # of the world|doc subcomponent are missing from the latter, and
      # build a tarball out of them.
      findextradocs () {
      }
  
      # Add extra docs to ${WORKDIR}/$1
      addextradocs () {
      }
     
  

• Adding -j NUMBER flags to buildworld and obj targets in the scripts/build.subr script may speed up processing depending on the hardware used, however it is not necessary. Using these flags in other targets is not recommended, as it may cause the build to become unreliable.

                 # Build the world
             log "Building world"
             cd /usr/src &&
             make -j 2 ${COMPATFLAGS} buildworld 2>&1
  
          # Distribute the world
             log "Distributing world"
             cd /usr/src/release &&
             make -j 2 obj &&
             make ${COMPATFLAGS} release.1 release.2 2>&1
  

• Create a firewall rule to block outgoing RST packets. Due to a bug noted in a posting on the FreeBSD-STABLE mailing list mailing list in April 2009, there may be time-outs and failures when updating a system.

• Create an appropriate DNS SRV record for the update server, and put others behind it with variable weights. Using this facility will provide update mirrors.

   _http._tcp.update.myserver.com.                  IN SRV   0 2 80   host1.myserver.com.
                                   SRV   0 1 80   host2.myserver.com.
                                   SRV   0 0 80   host3.myserver.com.