Not so long ago I wrote about how you can configure FreeBSD to email you regarding available updates on a weekly basis. This is something that I have had in place for a while now, and I really enjoy the ability to keep things on the patched (read: bleeding) edge. Recently I found a small issue with the setup I had been using. I wanted to share the fix with anyone that may have been doing the same thing. First of all, let me tell you about the issue I came across. When I would recieve an email regarding available updates I would connect to the FreeBSD Jail and use portmaster -a -d to apply all available updates. I noticed that the number of updates applied did not match the number of updates listed in the email. Odd. Well, after thinking about it for a bit I realized what the problem was. Read more

Update: I have suggested a minor improvement to this setup. Read More… For some time now I’ve been maintaining about a dozen FreeBSD jails, each running a different set of services. Everything from email to BIND, DHCP to nagios. One of the difficulties of trying to maintain so many servers has been tracking and applying updates, particularly servers that use the ports system which is updated so frequently. The solution that I’ve come up with is to use portmaster inside a weekly cron job to notify me of available updates on each machine. This requires a slightly different cron job on the host system that within the jails. Here is an example of what I’m running within each: #!/usr/local/bin/bash /usr/sbin/portsnap cron /usr/local/bin/ezjail-admin update -P /usr/local/sbin/portmaster -L | egrep -B1 ‘(ew|ort) version|Aborting|installed|dependencies|IGNORE|marked|reason:|MOVED’ | grep -v ‘^–‘ | mail -s “Portmaster Weekly Check for $(hostname)” [email protected] <br /> #! Read more