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Setting up a faster way to keep your FreeBSD servers up to date.

"To set up a FreeBSD build system, you need three components. A build server is the first requirement. It should be either a fairly beefy uniprocessor or a lesser SMP-based machine. The second component is a staging server, which is basically a test machine where you can test the build without potentially destroying a production box.

An important part of any software development process is getting reliable builds of the software. Despite it's importance, we are often surprised when this isn't done. Here we discuss the process that Matt has put into place on a major project at ThoughtWorks, a process that is increasingly used throughout the company. It stresses a fully automated and reproducible build, including testing, that runs many times a day.