# freebsd-update and pkg install from air-gapped system



## tegaP0PwkubtXdsK (Jun 15, 2015)

Hello,

I have four air-gapped freebsdFreeBSD 10.1 systems.

1. How do I go about `freebsd-update fetch`?  I tried copying /var/db/freebsd-update/ from an online machine to the air-gapped machines, but that did not work.

2. How do I install packages (from source or from pkg)?

Thank you,
Chris


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## tobik@ (Jun 15, 2015)

From what I understand `freebsd-update fetch` stores the updates in /var/db/freebsd-update so that step isn't necessary once you copied everything.


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## tegaP0PwkubtXdsK (Jun 15, 2015)

tobik said:


> From what I understand `freebsd-update fetch` stores the updates in /var/db/freebsd-update so that step isn't necessary once you copied everything.



That doesn't work.   After copying those contents and issuing `freebsd-update install`, I get the message "run freebsd-update fetch first".  When I run `freebsd-update fetch` it tells me it cannot connect to server (of course).

Chris


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## tobik@ (Jun 15, 2015)

How did you copy those contents? `freebsd-update` looks for symlinks in that directory. `cp` won't preserve symlinks by default. For `cp` use the -a (archive) option. tar(1) would be yet another option.

chrisstankevitz tegaP0PwkubtXdsK
Are you using two accounts? Or do you two just have the same problem?


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## tegaP0PwkubtXdsK (Jun 16, 2015)

Yes, I'm using two accounts... although strange as this is going to sounds I cannot figure out how I logged in with an account called "chrisstankevitz" -- because according to my "master list" I don't have an account with that name!??

BTW, Colin Percival (author of freebsd-update) explained yesterday regarding copying /var/db/freebsd-update from one machine to another:



> It's not really designed for that.  Once upon a time I had a clean way of doing this, but nobody seemed to be using that functionality so I dropped it in favour of improving the protocol.



Chris


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## tegaP0PwkubtXdsK (Jun 16, 2015)

tobik said:


> For `cp` use the -a (archive) option. tar(1) would be yet another option.



tobik,

This worked!  Thank you for your help,

Chris


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