What are "Load Averages"?

Cool, if very technical, article on 'load averages' and how Unix figures these out. You can see them if you use top, and check out some of the numbers at the top.

UNIX Load Average Part 1: How It Works by Dr. Neil Gunther

Upgrading Perl

If you are going to upgrade perl (currently, if you go to 5.8.7), be sure to read the /usr/ports/UPDATING note:

20050624:
AFFECTS: users of lang/perl5.8

lang/perl5.8 has been updated to 5.8.7.  You should update
everything depending on perl.  The easiest way to do that is
to use perl-after-upgrade script supplied with lang/perl5.8.
Please see its manual page for details.

In other words:

run "perl-after-upgrade" (note the remarks)


run "perl-after-upgrade -f" (to make the changes)

Syncing /usr/ports

Say you have two machines that you want to keep up to date with /usr/ports. Rather than running cvsup on both of them, you have a couple of options:

• Use rsync for /usr/ports from the fast machine to the slower machine.


• Use pkg_create's -b option, then use those packages on the other machine(s).

Stop package from upgrading

Question: How do I tell portupgrade to not upgrade a particular port? Say, an upgraded app breaks on my system and I want it to be ignored when I do an "upgrade all" via portupgrade.

Answer:

• Use the '-x' option


• Long term solution - HOLD_PKGS in /usr/local/etc/pkgtools.conf

Keeping FreeBSD up to date

An excellent article on keeping FreeBSD up to date, especially remotely (as I will be doing in the next few days):


TaoSecurity: Keeping FreeBSD Up-To-Date