Learning and understanding FreeBSD Ports can be somewhat daunting. The amount of information you find on it is large and vast. Here is a compressed and what I hope you find to be useful article on the subject.

Getting the ports collection

If you did not choose to install the ports collection during the FreeBSD installation then you will need to get it through Cvsup.

The ports collection can also be accessed by ftp using
/stand/sysinstall

Once you are in the FreeBSD configuration tool go to Configure and then Packages. Here you will want to choose FTP. Select the packages you wish to install and go to Install at the end and FreeBSD will use the pkg_add tool on each one to quickly add it.

 Yahoo! began life at Stanford University on a DEC Alpha box running OSF and a Sparc 20 running SunOS. They served us well for the first year but we learned that neither system was really designed for handling a large number of HTTP requests.

Ok, so I have done some real hacking with the best way to install, update and maintain openssh & openssl on a freebsd server. Along the way I have learned a great deal about the ports tree and package management. Here I have documented what I have learn and I hope it is useful to the freebsd world.

Note: I have written two previous articles on the subject and they have some errors in them. I will not go into the what the errors are but you will see it clearly after you read the rest of this article.

! ! ! USE AT YOUR OWN RISK ! ! !
The information here is for personal use only.
! ! ! USE AT YOUR OWN RISK ! ! !

Here is the how, what, and why of it all.

THIS ARTICLE IS OUT OF DATE PLEASE GOTO AND READ THE FOLLOWING

 Upgrading OpenSSH & OpenSSL on FreeBSD the right way!

 

Well, I updated my portstree and upgraded my OpenSSL package and BAM! no more ssh.

it is NOT a good idea to upgrade OpenSLL before OpenSSH.

If you do you may get an error like this "OpenSSL version mismatch"

Keep reading to learn how to fix it.

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 Upgrading OpenSSH & OpenSSL on FreeBSD the right way!

I was installing the Apache2 port on my lab server and it would error out due to OpenSSL version incompatebility. This ment I needed to upgrade my OpenSSL installation. No problem right? Will that depends on two things. First, do you want to install OpenSSL over the currently installed version, or do you want a fresh install of OpenSSL. If you want to install it over the currently installed version then keep reading. If you want a fresh install of OpenSSL then my Quick & Dirty below but don't use any directive for "make install".

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 Upgrading OpenSSH & OpenSSL on FreeBSD the right way!

 

Here is my Quick & Dirty for upgrading OpenSSH on FreeBSD 4.5.I have not tested this on other versions of FreeBSD, but I don't see why it wouldn't work.

 

Summary

Here are a few options I use in my FreeBSD kernel. I often use many more then this depending on what type of server I am building but these are ones I general always use. More information regarding Kernel Options can be found on you computer by reading what is called the Kernel LINT file. READ THIS FILE! at least once.

LINT File = /usr/src/sys/i386/conf/LINT

For instruction on rebuilding the kernel CLICK HERE.

Rebuilding the FreeBSD Kernel is really straight forward compared to the Linux kernel.There are two ways to do this. Both will be documented here but I have only used the first method. I have tried using the 2nd method but it just never works for me.