Solved What is the best method to keep FreeBSD on AWS-EC2 up to date?

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obsigna

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I did a trial setup on AWS-EC2 using the FreeBSD 10.2 AMI by Colin Percival from the AWS Marketplace. The installation went smooth by a few clicks, and everything is running well for now. However, I got some doubts about the updating path, because the usage instructions of the AMI descriptions state:
From there on, standard FreeBSD usage and system configuration applies, except that freebsd-update cannot be used (due to local patches needed for the FreeBSD/EC2 platform).
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When I cannot use freebsd-update, what else should I do to keep the system updated?
 
I'd guess you'd have to go the source route ( cd /usr/src/ && make buildworld etc.). But you'd probably also need to re-apply those patches before building.
 
That was not exactly the answer that I hoped for, anyway thank you very much.

On the FreeBSD 10 AMI, /usr/src is empty, and it is not obvious what kind of "patches" we are talking about and where these are.

For the time being, I will try to handle patch level updates manually, case by case. Fortunately the AMI is on 10.2-p12. For system upgrades, I guess I will start a new fresh AMI, get my stuff over, and then terminate the old one. When I ever use this for production services, then I have to stay on the narrow road when it comes to customizations and keep my stuff on a small number of locations.
 
obsigna said:
On the FreeBSD 10 AMI, /usr/src is empty, and it is not obvious what kind of "patches" we are talking about and where these are.
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Getting /usr/src/ is the easy part. But this would get you a "vanilla" FreeBSD and it would probably be missing the local patches that were required to get FreeBSD working correctly on EC2. So after updating /usr/src/ you would need to re-apply those patches or else you may end up with a non-working system.
 
On the mailing list freebsd-cloud I received the authoritative statement:
Colin Percival said:
You can use freebsd-update. The text on that Marketplace page is out of date.
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So, this is not an issue anymore.
 
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