(skip rant)
With all due respect, several people have responded to the actual question.
Several people have responded to the
post, not the
question. For a moment, let's just assess the responses...
#2. "I fail to understand the problem..." -- good for you, but doesn't help me.
#3. "Stop being lazy..." -- thanks for the ad hominem.
#4. "The only way to get up-to-date packages would be compiling from ports" -- the first real address to the question -- thanks Zirias, I'm sorry I missed this in my first read through.
#5. "Have to agree with the others" -- still doesn't get me anywhere
#5a. "Note that old jails continue to run fine on newer hosts" -- that's useful to know -- thanks for this, too (I imagine that there is at least going to be some limitation to this, though, but that is a separate issue for later examination)
#6. "The longer you wait to apply your upgrades the bigger the issues are going to be." -- the first acknowledgement that, actually, it might not be as straightforward as everyone else is making out; presents useful advice for later, but not for now.
#7. Someone who may have a legitimate reason not to just blindly fire off the update command; bit of a hijack, but possibly relevant, so OK.
#8. A response specifically to #7, ultimately boiling down to "Just buy more stuff"
#9. Another response to #7 -- already tangental -- and certainly not an answer to #1
#9a. "That would be a very bad idea." -- vague warning is vague, some detail might be useful
#10. I think this is a reply to #6; it doesn't seem wholly relevant to #1, though, but maybe I've missed a nuance
#11. Closure of #7, tail between legs. Bet that person's glad they joined in, now, eh...?
#12. ...in which one fleetingly attempts to get back to the point...
#13. Thanks for this possible workaround, although it may be chicken-and-egg, in that I first have to have upgraded before I can pkg install poudriere. Still again, a possible point of interest for future endeavours.
#14. ...acknowledgement of #13...
#15. A very kind offer, for which I am grateful, but I don't wish to burden someone solely on my behalf.
#16. Useful, caveats understood and accepted -- thanks
#17. Again, useful -- thanks
In the first 10 replies, only one addresses my question directly (I missed it first time round, I'm sorry). Some useful replies
after I asked everyone to stay on topic.
I'm glad all the people who are just telling me to upgrade are so absolutely confident in the upgrade process, and haven't ever been bitten by any issue during their lifetime. I
haven't had that same experience. There's a myriad of things I need to check and be comfortable with in myself, before I pull the trigger on such a potentially-destructive process.
I want to draw a line under the above -- it isn't intended as an attack on anyone, and I am genuinely appreciative of the free time and wisdom people have put in to contribute to this conversation.
To address the remainder of your response (#18):
It would be a waste of resources to build packages for a release that is unsupported.
I agree that there is no need to continually build the packages, but it
might not be a waste to keep a static copy of the
last build after support has ended. I don't necessarily sign up to the whole "storage is cheap" notion, but there is
some argument for keeping these around. It seems somewhat cynical (at least to me) to allow people to continue downloading older versions of the base ISO, if you are going to render it useless by deleting all the software that worked on it.
That's a matter of philosophy, though, and I'm not trying to change the world here.
The current ports tree does not support releases that are unsupported
That's interesting to know but, again, we are not necessarily talking about the
current ports tree. If I haven't run
freebsd-update for a while, then the likelihood of my having run
portsnap is surely very low.
Of course you could keep the old ports tree as of 10.x, or check out the last ports tree from the repository that supports your FreeBSD version.
That is what I am interested in exploring. As an
interim measure. Until I am comfortable that I have all my ducks in a row, and am ready to update.
My takeaway from the thread so far is that,
if my last
portsnap was the same time as my last
freebsd-update, and
if the resources referenced by the various makefiles in those ports are still available, then
make install is still viable in the short-term.
But then you can only build old versions of the ports
I'm not sure how many different ways I need to explain that I understand that these will be old versions, and that old versions are very probably insecure. I thought that my acknowledging that I wouldn't have the latest security updates back in in post #1 was enough, but everyone seems to have missed that.
If you still decide that you do not want to update your machine whatsoever, then please do yourself and everyone else a favor – take the machine offline and do not connect it to the internet anymore
Again, a private server on a private LAN, providing a backup fileshare for my main computers, and a couple of jails for things I once found interesting. Not serving anyone else, not used day-to-day, etc. With all the Win2003/2008 servers still around in the world---and us barely being able to buy a toaster that doesn't have a wi-fi client, these days---this box is the least of my concerns.
I do think that you are possibly putting too much stock in the term "supported", though. I ultimately acknowledged that I wasn't
supported when I chose to install a free operating system, on some commodity hardware, in the corner of my living room, in my free time. I haven't paid for a maintenance contract, so I have no illusion of
support. This thread was really intended to be a
discussion within a community of people with some subject-matter knowledge that exceeded my own, and not some expectation of
support.
To think, this whole thing started because I wanted to quickly look inside a file without dragging it down to my main, and I couldn't get
pkg-static to install
archivers/unrar, because the regular mirrors don't have
FreeBSD:10:amd64 any more.
I'm OK with that---stuff moves on---but the answer to that very basic initial requirement surely isn't
burn down everything you have and rebuild it. I can't believe that the FreeBSD team would engineer something that injects such a large dependency on
themselves to keep every user's server afloat.
So I wondered if there was an existing mirror that may have kept 10.x packages around, that I could somehow switch
pkg to using, to meet that short-term need.
For what it is worth, I
did find a host still serving the
FreeBSD:10:i386 and
FreeBSD:10:amd64 directories alongside the current 11.x, 12.x, 13.x and 14.x ABIs, so I assume the providers of
that have experienced similar issues. I won't link it here, but it's easy enough to find, and purports to be in the the Netherlands.
I acknowledge that, if I use that third-party mirror, I do so at my own risk, and that they may not choose to keep it around forever.
But, given the very limited use-case I've described (i.e. banging a quick utility app into an existing jail for a quick one-off use), is my simplest option to add a new
/usr/local/etc/pkg/repos/FreeBSD.conf, with the below in it...
Code:
FreeBSD: {
url: "pkg+hxxp://themirror.example.com/path-to/freebsd-pkg/${ABI}/latest"
}
...or is there more to it?
Thanks.
