I miss FreeBSD

My ISP wants me to run openSuSE Linux instead of FreeBSD on our hosted server. It took me a while to get used to administering Apache/PHP/Drupal based sites on openSUSE rather than FreeBSD because SuSE and linux in general keeps config files in many different places. That's OK, as long as the documentation is good. I must confess that I much prefer the FreeBSD handbook to the OpenSuSE documentation. I find it hard to navigate my way around the OpenSuSE site, and too many wiki pages are empty stubs.

Today I tried to do an update of Apache from the supported SuSE 11.1 version (Apache 2.2.10) to the latest version Apache 2.2.16 is out, but there's a set of compiled rpms on the OpenSuse server at version 2.2.15 which is good enough for me). I spent four hours getting NOWHERE.

I miss FreeBSD! On a different server, one running FreeBSD, I updated from Apache 2.2.14 to 2.2.16 by typing a few commands, taking under an hour.

1) to update my ports tree, I used the command "csup ports-supfile" (the ports supfile having previously been configured to point to the nearest mirror), followed by "cd /usr/ports ; make fetchindex".  These two commands together updated the collection of "ports"

2) Then I used the  command "portupgrade apache" to build and install the latest version of Apache.

3) Then I simply ran "apachectl restart" to restart apache, loading the latest version.

Started just before 8am, finished by 8:30am. Simple. And the ports tree can be updated independently of doing an update, so that if you're updating more than one application you can skip the first stage for subsequent updates.