6 Tips

• If you build your own release using the native make release procedure, the freebsd-update-server code will work from your release. As an example, you may build a release without ports or documentation and add a custom kernel. After removing functionality pertaining to the documentation subroutine and altering the buildworld() subroutine in scripts/build.subr, the freebsd-update-code will successfully build update code on this release.

• Add make -j NUMBER to scripts/build.subr to speed up processing. Adding flags to anything other than make buildworld and make obj may cause the build to become unreliable.

• Create a firewall rule to block outgoing RST packets. Due to a bug noted in this posting, you will have many time-outs and fail to update a system.

• Create an appropriate DNS SRV record for your update server, and put others behind it with variable weights. This effectively creates update mirrors.

   _http._tcp.update.myserver.com.                  IN SRV   0 2 80   host1.myserver.com.
                                                       SRV   0 1 80   host2.myserver.com.
                                                       SRV   0 0 80   host3.myserver.com.
  

• Please read the source documentation. It contains valuable information that will allow you to utilize all features of the software.