freebsdguy

CVSup - slow, painful, annoying (imho, prove me wrong!).

For the last year or so I’ve exclusively used Portsnap.  From the handbook:

Portsnap is a system for securely distributing the FreeBSD ports tree. Approximately once an hour, a “snapshot” of the ports tree is generated, repackaged, and cryptographically signed. The resulting files are then distributed via HTTP.

Portsnap is VERY easy to use and requires practically no configuration, unlike cvsup.  It is included with FreeBSD 6+ (earlier versions of FreeBSD will need to have portsnap installed).

If you are installing Portsnap from ports, you’ll need to do 1 thing prior to use, and that is copy the configuration file to the correct location:

cp /usr/local/etc/portsnap.conf.sample /usr/local/etc/portsnap.conf

Also, if you’re running FreeBSD 6 and don’t have a ports collection already:

mkdir /usr/ports

Now we can get down to business!  First we fetch the portsnap image:

portsnap fetch

.. and then we extract the portsnap image:

portsnap extract

In the future, if we want to update the ports tree (which you WILL), issue the following commands:

portsnap fetch
portsnap update

If you’re lazy (I hope you are!), add a crontab line to execute:

portsnap cron && portsnap -I update

portsnap cron does the same as fetch, but adds a random wait time up to an hour to ensure that not everybody is hitting the servers at midnight or whatever.