> > Unfortunatly, I have never successfully upgraded a Free box yet, mind you > > I have only tried it on one. > > > > Last year I was dropped into a production environment with all 4.3 > > machines. I have no devel equipment prior to 4.6. The upgrade attempts > > were all only on one box (4.6) and failed due to suspect hardware. > > > > My question is not howto upgrade, but; > > > > 1> Since I have only production equipment to 'test' an upgrade on, I am > > very nervous. At what point of the upgrade procedure is it too late to > > turn back if something does not go right. > > If you install the kernel, then reboot (before installing world) you will > be ensuring that the new kernel you built will boot reliably. This is > the final practical point of return. If you have problems with the new > kernel booting, you can copy /kernel.old back to /kernel and be back to > where you started. If the new kernel is fine, continue with installworld. > Once you've installed world, however, it's an ungodly amount of work to > revert everything. > > > 2> I keep amanda tape backups of every file system on all machines. If > > something goes critically wrong, can the system be rebooted at least to > > the point where I can pull data back off tapes? > > As long as your system is bootable, yes. Do you have FreeBSD 4.3 CDs? > If so, you can easily do a base install, and then restore from backup to > get back up and running as you were. (should things happen to go > terribly wrong) > > I've very seldom had any problems upgrading using cvsup. You will hit a > few (minor) gotchas ... read /usr/src/UPDATING and you won't have any > problems with them. > > Basically: > Update your source with cvsup > read /usr/src/UPDATING and follow any instructions required (I believe > you'll need to manually create the relatively new sendmail users) > Reveiw you kernel config file to see if any options have changed since > 4.3 > make buildkernel > make installkernel > reboot >>> if the reboot doesn't go well, boot kernel.old and copy it to > /kernel to get back to 4.3 > make buildworld > make installworld > > Going from 4.3 -> 4.7 may cause some problems with some ports. The solution > is generally to uninstall the port and rebuild it. Update your ports tree > first. > > Schedule yourself a nice chunk of time to do the first machine, then you'll > be able to better predict the time required for the rest. >
Thanks for the goldmine of info! Unfortunatly, my boxes are sooo old :o) that cvsup appears to be out of date, as I get 'Protocol negotiation failed'. Catch 22 I guess, so I found on http://people.freebsd.org/~jdp/s1g (I think this is John Poelstra's site?) That I have to upgrade my cvsup. I will do this then let you know how the upgrade went. Thanks again. > -- > Bill Moran > Potential Technologies > http://www.potentialtech.com > > To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
