Daemonic Dispatches

Portsnap server problems.

I received an email two weeks ago from Jacques Vidrine, FreeBSD's Security Officer Emeritus: Some new donated machines were now available for use by the FreeBSD Security Team. After upgrading to FreeBSD 6.0, I started the process of rewriting my portsnap build code to run on FreeBSD 6.x instead of FreeBSD 4.x.

None too soon, as it turns out. I received a rather disturbing email yesterday from my current portsnap buildbox:

Could not create directory '/root/.ssh'.
Host key verification failed.

When I investigated further, it turned out that the hard drive was dying: /root/ and a number of binaries in /bin/ had shuffled off this mortal coil. A few months ago, I encountered a problem with some files on /tmp/ and fixed the problem via newfs; sadly, that's not an option when the problem is on the root partition.

I've managed to get that system partially functional: Portsnap builds are running again, but without INDEX builds. This means that portsnap users will be receiving up-to-date ports trees together with rather out-of-date INDEX files. (But hopefully no more than 24 hours out of date -- I'm generating INDEX files on a different system and feeding them to my portsnap buildbox.)

Meanwhile, I'm going to try to get the new portsnap buildbox up and running as soon as possible...

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