kahunaburger

I mentioned before that I really like FreeBSD and I’ve been using it since version 3.x more than 5 years ago.

I had a spare PC and decided to install a beta release of the latest FreeBSD version 8. The initial installation was a snap and the PC has been running rock solid. I even used the binary update facility freebsd-update to upgrade beta versions and on to the first release candidate which became available a little while ago.

I have not played with some of the more esoteric features, but soon I will experiment with the new ZFS file systems that are officially supported by version 8.

Every night around 3am my ports tree is updated from the official repositories. A simple portsnap update followed by a portupgrade --all --batch --verbose recompiles and reinstalls everything that has changed since the last portupgrade run.
One thing that always annoyed me in the past was the fact that portupgrade did not seem to restart certain daemons/servers when they were reinstalled. An update to the mysql server for example left me without a running database server once the mysql server was reinstalled. I finally found a solution to that problem, by modifying my pkgtools.conf file.

The following additions to BEFOREDEINSTALL and AFTERINSTALL make sure that servers/daemons are stopped and restarted.

  BEFOREDEINSTALL = {
    # stop daemons/servers
    '*' => proc { |origin|
      cmd_stop_rc(origin)
    },
  }

  AFTERINSTALL = {
    # restart daemons/servers
    '*' => proc { |origin|
        cmd_start_rc(origin)
      },
  }