FreeBSD 15.1

An upgrade story
Today FreeBSD 15.1 was released and we got to use the new'ish pkg base process to update all our machines and jails. This was an entirely pain free and enjoyable process, although perhaps still a touch more complicated then a true rolling release experience.
Upgrading host system to 15.1
This could be better, and I suspect one day it will be. Ideally one would type something like "pkg upgrade release" and not have to fuss around with this small step, but its a huge improvement on the old way so I won't complain too much.
Then I updated third party pkgs on the new kernel, in theory one could also reboot here
Upgrading Jails
Grab the new release
Then update jails to that new release, write a tiny script for many of them
Upgrade all the jails third party pkgs with a single command. Wonder why the same doesn't exist for the jails themselves.
Pkg Caching saves some of the day
This may be to where our servers are based in the world, but at times the pkg updates can very slow. And as we have multiple machines, even more jails per machine that need updating. This gets painful quickly.
I had a machine already running with some spare ram and nginx already running. So I mounted /var/cache in ram and setup some proxy rules in nginx.
part of nginx.conf
Then on all machines I want to pull pkgs via the cache, update the pkg config file to point to pkg.8by3.net instead of pkg.freebsd.org
/etc/pkg/FreeBSD.conf
I don't know if there is an existing / simpler way of doing this. It was an idea I had using a rather unix'y philosophy of combining simple tools I already had on hand. The eagle eyed amongst you will notice the 30m cache for the catalogue, this is there to avoid locking onto old version of the catalogue without shortening the caching of everything else to only 30m.
Pkgabaseify
If you are totally new to the idea of pkg base and are still doing pkgs the "bad old" way, i.e using freebsd-update fetch, freebsd-update install etc. Then go check this lua script to migrate to using pkg base. I've successfully migrated both a 14.2 and 15.0 system over to pkg base.
Normal x.x.# upgrades
Once you are on pkg base, then doing patch version updates is as simple as
And that's all folks, I need to figure out how to write more about this sort of thing.
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