Initially, when I heard about freebsd-rustdate I was very skeptical. I have a fear of “Written in <new hip language>”. I thought, however, I’ll wait, and when the time comes, I will try and see how it works.
For the last couple of days I’ve been updating hosts and jails for my customers and my company, and one of the best resources I found was the FreeBSD Update page on FreeBSD’s Wiki, specially the “freebsd-update Reverse Proxy Cache” section. It has saved me hours when updating the hosts. For some hosts we even did an NFS mount of /var/db/freebsd-update/files directory.
But when it came to upgrading the jails, I realized that this is going to take a very long time. Each host has at least 15 jails, up to 50. There’s a host which has 100+ jails.
Upgrading all of them was going to take a very, very long time. So I ended up doing some research. Here were my options.
- Build FreeBSD once and run make install everywhere else using NFS and DESTDIR (I used to do this years ago)
- Migrate to PkgBase (we’ve started doing this, but we’re not done yet, and it will take a while)
- Nuke the Jails, start fresh, and just move the data (this could work, and I will do that in the future, but now I need to update ~200 jails in the coming 3 days)
- Somehow, make
freebsd-updaterun faster.
As you have guessed, I went for the last option. Uncle Dave reminded me of freebsd-rustdate again, and I decided to give it a try. Even before starting, my good friend Daniel wrote in our group chat:
@dch my guy. You just saved me several hours per year of flipping back and forth between terminals waiting for the next part of a freebsd-update upgrades to finish running on a million systems.
I arrived to my parent’s house, installed freebsd-rustdate on a host, and tested it on a single jail. Here is my initial reaction
holy fuck freebsd-rustdate is fucking fast
Like I said, I hate “rewrite in <new hip language>”, but clearly, this time it’s a winner.
And frankly speaking, my Jail manager, jailer, does have the same problems that freebsd-update has. It’s much, much slower when you have to manage 100+ jails. I will, however, not rewrite it in another language (for now, and if I do, it will be in Oberon). Although I might end up spending some good amount of time optimizing it 🙂
Kudos to Matthew Fuller, amazing work. And I have to mention, when I was thinking about moving to FreeBSD more than a decade ago, his rant “BSD for Linux Users” was the deciding factor for me, and I’ve been using FreeBSD ever since.
That’s all folks…
