Monitoring freebsd-update

anselm

anselm

I want to integrate the update status of the base system into my monitoring. Is there an easy way to query freebsd-update(8) or any other tool to give me information on whether there are updates available?

I thought of a way similar to what I can do with pkg: pkg audit -q | wc -l for example will give me an integer indicating the number of installed packages that have open vulnerabilities. I can perfectly integrate that metric into my monitoring.

I thought of the following possibilities to do the same with the base system, but none was satisfying for me so far:
  • Running freebsd-update cron periodically will produce mails from cron and is not nice to integrate into a monitoring like Zabbix.
  • freebsd-version(1) shows me the current kernel and base system version of my installation. Can I query the latest version online and compare it? It would however not indicate if my system configuration really needs an update.
  • If freebsd-update(8) runs periodically with cron or fetch, can I somehow how read the update status from /var/db/freebsd-update?
Somebody has a better idea?
 
Though not available in FreeBSD by default, there is a package used by the PC-BSD branch that will check for either base system updates and/or package updates. I think the utility is part of the TrueOS-base package. Running pc-updatemanager check will search for upgrades to the base system and report back on available updates. That might give you better results than using plain freebsd-update(8).
 
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