Before plunging headlong into the world of Debian GNU / Linux a few years I have worked almost exclusively with FreeBSD , I continue to use some of the servers hosting critical applications.

How to (almost) everyone knows, FreeBSD provides two distinct mechanisms for the installation of applications: the system of packages for the installation of prebuilt packages and the ports tree to install autocompilante. The first method of package management like in all respects to those adopted by the major Linux distros. For those who normally works with Slackware the similarities are particularly apparent, as evidenced by the screenshot of a page of `sysinstall` I reproduce below.

A different case of ports, which in a sense are the "real" software management tool under FreeBSD. The management of ports allows you to download locally the tree or the tree of the complete build instructions and installation, broken down by categories of software. In each port discharged into the local tree is a description of the dependencies and the skeleton code. Through a series of simple commands you can install, uninstall, reinstall, delete, update any program installed on the server, including the core operating system services.

For proper maintenance of ports dell'alberatura is good to establish a mechanism for updating the tree. First, make sure that the ports are installed on the server, otherwise we think about it:

# pkg_add -r cvsup-without-gui
# mkdir /usr/ports

The first command CVSup installed, the software that runs under FreeBSD versioning ports.

Now proceed to the population dell'alberatura updated the ports:

# cvsup -L 2 -h cvsup9.FreeBSD.org /usr/share/examples/cvsup/ports-supfile

Often, after many seconds of inactivity, the command returns a connection error. Do not worry, in this case, wait a few seconds or try to change the repository by scaling from 9 - theory, the least used - down:

# cvsup -L 2 -h cvsup8.FreeBSD.org /usr/share/examples/cvsup/ports-supfile
# cvsup -L 2 -h cvsup7.FreeBSD.org /usr/share/examples/cvsup/ports-supfile
# cvsup -L 2 -h cvsup6.FreeBSD.org /usr/share/examples/cvsup/ports-supfile
# cvsup -L 2 -h cvsup5.FreeBSD.org /usr/share/examples/cvsup/ports-supfile
# cvsup -L 2 -h cvsup4.FreeBSD.org /usr/share/examples/cvsup/ports-supfile
[...]

By repeating this simple procedure every time we want to make a full update of the ports we will always have updated software available for our FreeBSD servers. If we want to, for example, install the latest version of `mutt`, the popular e-mail management program from the command line, proceed as follows:

# cd /usr/ports
# make search name=Mutt
# cd mail/mutt
# make install clean

Done ... :-)