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Staying Current with NetBSD

Posted by michael on from the when-apt-get-dist-upgrade-isn't-available dept.

BSDForums writes "Open source never stands still. Even the flexible and mature BSDs are continuing to evolve. In this article, Michael Lucas looks at the NetBSD upgrade process, demonstrating the most common steps to stay abreast of the current source code. This article isn't a comprehensive tutorial that covers every possible situation; rather, it covers the most common situation: updating your source with CVS, building that source code, and installing it on the build machine."

2 of 22 comments (clear)

  1. Secure CVS - how did NetBSD do it? by hrarbinger · · Score: 4, Interesting
    The article shows you how to get the updates via CVS over SSH with this:

    # setenv CVSROOT anoncvs@anoncvs.netbsd.org:/cvsroot
    # setenv CVS_RSH ssh
    ....

    Now I'd always heard that CVS' pserver wasn't the most stable or secure thing in the world, and that you should use CVS over SSH instead. However I also heard that the abilities of a CVS user were such that if they were determined enough, they'd be able to get shell-like access through the commands that are available. Thus you were only supposed to give CVS access to users who you also give shell access.

    So my question is this: do the NetBSD folks have a page anywhere that describes their anonymous CVS setup? I assume they've done a secure job of locking it down to prevent the entire world from being able to get into their download server for obvious reasons.

  2. Re:Cool. by Dahan · · Score: 2, Interesting
    I gather that there is a dependency or two for building cvsup that isn't portable across the various architectures out there, and so it's not very popular in the NetBSD camp.

    cvsup is written in Modula-3, and the Modula-3 compiler hasn't been ported to many of the platforms NetBSD supports. I think it's only available for NetBSD/i386, actually...