FreeBSD Binary Upgrade News

If you've read my previous posts on FreeBSD binary upgrades you'll see that Colin Percival's work on this subject has been one of my favorite additions to FreeBSD during the last few years. I recommend reading the latest two posts on Colin's blog for even more good news: FreeBSD minor version upgrades and FreeBSD major version upgrades using FreeBSD update.

I plan to deploy FreeBSD 7.0 in production soon, and the native capability to upgrade the OS using binary means is incredibly welcome. I build sensors to inspect and capture traffic, not recompile themselves. Congratulations and thanks to Colin for all of his work in this area and for integrating FreeBSD update into the base OS.

On another FreeBSD note, I need to try this: Building bootable FreeBSD/i386 images.

Comments

Joe said…
The tool freebsd-update is a great tool. However freebsd-update and portsnap are still reported to not work very well behind some proxies. Whether its the fault of the pipelined http client (phttp) used by both tools or the proxy itself, is unknown.
1:26 PM
Anonymous said…
In the past phttpget had issues with proxies which did not implement HTTP/1.1 correctly; but I recently added workarounds which appear to fix that problem.
11:06 PM
Anonymous said…
I've noticed some of those issues in my environment, where access to the web passes through some transparent Blue Coat proxies. freebsd-update eventually completes without errors, but it must be run repeatedly. We believe it has to do with caching of metadata, as all repository-based OS updates we've tried (ubuntu/debian apt-get, fedora/redhat yum, freebsd-updates) exhibit issues.

Looking forward to changes to see what they fix. :)
12:10 AM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Zeek in Action Videos

Image
This is a quick note to point blog readers to my Zeek in Action YouTube video series for the Zeek network security monitoring project .  Each video addresses a topic that I think might be of interest to people trying to understand their network using Zeek and adjacent tools and approaches, like Suricata, Wireshark, and so on.  I am especially pleased with Video 6 on monitoring wireless networks . It took me several weeks to research material for this video. I had to buy new hardware and experiment with a Linux distro that I had not used before -- Parrot .  Please like and subscribe, and let me know if there is a topic you think might make a good video.
Read more

MITRE ATT&CK Tactics Are Not Tactics

Image
Just what are "tactics"? Introduction MITRE ATT&CK  is a great resource, but something about it has bothered me since I first heard about it several years ago. It's a minor point, but I wanted to document it in case it confuses anyone else. The MITRE ATT&CK Design and Philosophy document from March 2020 says the following: At a high-level, ATT&CK is a behavioral model that consists of the following core components: • Tactics, denoting short-term, tactical adversary goals during an attack; • Techniques, describing the means by which adversaries achieve tactical goals; • Sub-techniques, describing more specific means by which adversaries achieve tactical goals at a lower level than techniques; and • Documented adversary usage of techniques, their procedures, and other metadata. My concern is with MITRE's definition of "tactics" as "short-term, tactical adversary goals during an attack," which is oddly recursive. The key word in the tacti...
Read more

New Book! The Best of TaoSecurity Blog, Volume 4

Image
  I've completed the TaoSecurity Blog book series . The new book is  The Best of TaoSecurity Blog, Volume 4: Beyond the Blog with Articles, Testimony, and Scholarship .  It's available now for Kindle , and I'm working on the print edition.  I'm running a 50% off promo on Volumes 1-3 on Kindle through midnight 20 April. Take advantage before the prices go back up. I described the new title thus: Go beyond TaoSecurity Blog with this new volume from author Richard Bejtlich. In the first three volumes of the series, Mr. Bejtlich selected and republished the very best entries from 18 years of writing and over 18 million blog views, along with commentaries and additional material.  In this title, Mr. Bejtlich collects material that has not been published elsewhere, including articles that are no longer available or are stored in assorted digital or physical archives. Volume 4 offers early white papers that Mr. Bejtlich wrote as a network defender, either for technica...
Read more