Essential FreeBSD Ports

In the spirit of documenting my FreeBSD system administration practices, I thought I would mention the FreeBSD ports I install on every system -- regardless of function. In the future you may see some of these migrate into the base installation, as happening with Portsnap. Others are well-established but have stayed out of the base system for various reasons.

• security/freebsd-update: described here as a tool to update a GENERIC kernel and userland, destined to move into FreeBSD 6.2


• sysutils/portupgrade: described here as a tool to keep ports/packages up-to-date


• security/portaudit: described here as a tool to find ports/packages with security vulnerabilities


• sysutils/pkg_cutleaves: described here as a tool to remove packages and their dependencies


• shells/bash: this is a legacy of my time using Linux, where Bash is the default shell

You can read a summary of many of these tools here as well.