[talk] Trying to recreate a 10.2 machine?

[Fongaboo]

Good idea except ZFS-on-root isn't an easy thing to achieve on Amazon EC2. 
I had been looking into it, but would involve conjuring up my own AMI, 
which is a mission all its own. I was looking to do ZFS originally for 
snapshotting, but realized I could easily use the host ECS snapshotting 
that AWS offers.

I ended up getting the following advice and it worked well:

> Either use the packages from the DVD or wipe out /usr/ports and unpack 
> ports.txz from the distribution (it will be in /usr/freebsd-dist in the 
> ISO image, tar xf foo.iso usr/freebsd-dist/ports.txz will get it for
> you, then tar xf usr/freebsd-dist/ports.txz -C / to unpack it).



On Tue, 18 Apr 2017, Jesse Callaway wrote:

> 
> 
> On Tue, Apr 18, 2017 at 8:32 AM, Fongaboo <freebsd at fongaboo.com> wrote:
>
>       Hello FreeBSD friends... I thought I might share this with you to see if anyone has any knowledge they can share...
>
>       https://www.reddit.com/r/freebsd/comments/663idb/trying_to_recreate_a_102_machine/
>
>             Trying to recreate a 10.2 machine? (self.freebsd)
>
>             submitted 3 minutes ago by fongaboo
>
>             I have a production machine running 10.2. When we last attempted freebsdupdate and pkg update, a bunch of software
>             we had installed broke. We were able to roll things back with a ZFS snapshot thank god.
>
>             We've since been given some steps to take with our particular software that will allow us to otherwise upgrade
>             things. But I still don't want to try it first on the production machine. So I've created an Amazon EC2 instance
>             with a 10.2 AMI, and am attempting to install everything the same as we have on the production machine, best I
>             can... So that I can then attempt the upgrade in this safe space first.
>
>             Problem is, even though I've installed FreeBSD 10.2 on this instance, it seems to be using newer ports in the ports
>             collection. For this to be an effective endeavor, I really need to install the versions of the software  that would
>             have installed in 2015/2016. Dependencies are failing when I try to make install, so it's an actual problem.
>
>             When I first launched the instance, I ran portsnap fetch/update. Is there some way I could either roll back to a
>             snapshot and run portsnap again with a modifier to get circa 2015 ports collection? Or could I somehow individually
>             modify the make command to get the versions of software packages that match the production machine?
>
>             I've tried portdowngrade but it doesn't seem to have the correct versions of some of the ports that are being
>             problematic.
> 
>
>       P.S. The software combo involved is pretty much FAMP, as described here: http://www.purplehat.org/?page_id=4
> 
>
>       TIA
>
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> 
> 
> Do you have a backup of the machine you're trying to clone? I'd take that ZFS snapshot and somehow get it written out to the test box rather
> than trying to script it to be similar. Then you can either do rollbacks in ZFS on the test box, or just cookie-cutter clone new test boxes
> in attempts to get a successful upgrade process.
> 
> --
> -jesse
> 
>