Hi, I have a number of machines and some of them are behind a proxy (a commercial, proprietary, "next generation" web-security appliance). It does not support HTTP-pipelining and as such (because freebsd-update does not support disabling http-pipeling), we need to open firewall ports to the specific IPs of the freebsd-update mirrors and chase those IP when they change. I build and host my own packages and it would be very convenient to host a mirror for freebsd-update(8) locally, too. I am aware of the possibility to build my own freebsd-update server, but I want to refrain from doing this, simply because I want to use the binaries as provided by the FreeBSD project. There is no documented way to mirror the official freebsd-update server (that I was able to find). What is the FreeBSD project's position on this?
In april of last year I posted a feature request: addition of rsync and HTTP service to update.freebsd.org servers [1]. In a similar situation, the second request will be relevant: addition of rsync service to pkg.freebsd.org servers [2]. But this querys seems to have been ignored. :( I also tried to send letters to some administrators, but no news yet. [1] https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=227170 [2] https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=226626
My educated guess is that Core has decided that with the move to pkg-base, this will no longer be necessary (pkg works without http-pipelining) and as such no work will be done on freebsd-update except for security-fixes. It will be a while before I have everything on FreeBSD 13 (which I assume to be the release with pkg-base), so it would have been nice to have a local mirror. https://wiki.freebsd.org/PkgBase
Pkg-base was expected at 12-RELEASE, now at 13-RELEASE, or will be delayed until 14-RELEASE. But we have to continue working all this time. A few minutes ago ticket #226626 change status New → Open. I hope will be found good way to keep the satellite mirrors.
Note that the process of running a local freebsd-update mirror is documented and all the relevant software is available. https://docs.freebsd.org/en/articles/freebsd-update-server/ https://github.com/freebsd/freebsd-update-build/ I'm closing this as "works as intended" from the clusteradm perspective. Deficiencies in the documentation can be filed as doc bugs (and assigned to the doc team) and bugs in the freebsd-update-build server should be filed against that project. As far as I can tell, nothing in this bug is actionable by clusteradm.