Lukas Engelhardt
I'm a 29-year-old system administrator from Germany, near Mainz. I started my training as an IT specialist for system integration in 2017 and have been working as a system administrator since 2020.
Since late 2023, I’ve been working with FreeBSD and am continuously learning more about it. My main focus is on automation using Ansible. In production environments, I primarily use FreeBSD for database servers and other core infrastructure components where stability is essential.
Session
Base system packages, or pkgbase for short is the FreeBSD initiative to move the operating system binaries from large binary archives to individual packages using the FreeBSD package manager, pkg(8).
In my talk, I will demonstrate how to utilize base system packages to perform FreeBSD OS updates.
By building pkgbase packages locally, it is easy to upgrade large numbers of hosts.
I will begin by explaining what pkgbase is and how to migrate existing Infrastructure, using the PKGBasify Script to convert existing hosts to be pkgbase-ready, and then using pkgbase to perform future upgrades.
I will move on to a build server to generate Base packages and publish them to the network via NGINX, as well as using that server to distribute Base packages.
I will walk through how to configure a client to perform major, minor and patch level upgrades utilizing the new pkgbase tech preview.
I use this pkgbase on a day-to-day basis in production environments that are not directly connected to the Internet to replace the previous workflow of manually updating from source, giving the overall update and deployment process a significant speed-up.