How to install distribution sets?

[paul_galbraith]

I have a minimal 9.2-RELEASE install on a remote system, and now I want to add the games distribution set, but I cannot figure out how to do this. I tried sysinstall with passive FTP but get a this error:

Unable to transfer the games distribution from ftp://ftp.freebsd.org

Passive FTP connections from the command line to the main FTP site work just fine, so I don't think it's a connectivity issue. I can't see the debug screen of sysinstall as I'm connecting by SSH, so I have no clue as to why it's failing.

I've seen several forum posts saying sysinstall is essentially dead, and not to use it, but I haven't found any clear guidelines for an alternate way to do this. I tried using freebsd-update explicity setting world/games as a component, and specifying AllowAdd and StrictComponent options. This didn't work for me, and trying the upgrade option fails since I can't upgrade to the same release I'm already at.

So what is the correct way to install a distribution set to an existing system?

 

[paul_galbraith]

In answer to my own question, it seems as easy as just grabbing the distribution package from the FTP site (e.g. ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/releases/amd64/9.2-RELEASE/games.txz) and then tar -C / -xcvf games.txz.

 

[phillipsjk]

sysinstall(8) is apparently deprecated (and does not appear to fetch distribution sets). The new way of doing things is bsdinstall(8). Just invoking bsdinstall distfetch does nothing because the default value of the DISTRIBUTIONS environment variable is none.