Installing the extra software

FreeBSD comes with a collection of ports - folders containing enough information to download and compile a huge range of programs. The basic ports collection was installed earlier but they get updated frequently so you need to update them.

Type the following:

cd /usr/ports/net/cvsup-without-gui
make install
edit /usr/share/examples/cvsup/ports-supfile

Change the line which starts:

*default host

to point to a local source (leave * at start of line). There's a list here of mirrors. (You can comment out ports-all and uncomment the ones you want but it only takes about 15 minutes to do the whole lot on a 2Mbit link and about 1 hour with a 56k modem. Comments in all the text files you'll use start with a #; anything after the # is ignored.)

Now type

/usr/local/bin/cvsup -g -L 2 /usr/share/examples/cvsup/ports-supfile

to make it happen (the switches mean:
no gui (-g)
level 2 (verbose) information (-L 2)

Once this has finished you will have a very wide range of software available - you're not going to use all of it but postfix, mailscanner and spamassassin need some of the other packages to be available - like this you avoid the weird errors where the compiler stops and says "can't find xxxxx".