Hi Austin,
Quiet for many years. Nice to see you again from the time of CD Sales,
etc. (;
You are 100% correct that the sysupgrade kick ass big time!
Anyway, just one thing on your upgrade and all.
Not sure if your version 6.8 was also an upgrade form before or a clean
install.
The reason I am thinking and asking about it, is that on 6.7 the default
file system was changed from FFS1 to FFS2 and I see that you resize some
partition and also did newfs on some of them.
So, I may be off here and it is a question as well if I am wrong to
know. But you may have a mix of FFS1 and FFS2 partition now. I really
don't know if using newfs would create FFS2 on your system if it was an
upgrade from older version BEFORE the 6.7 keeping the FFS1 type.
Now may be in a decade or what not, may be FFS will be drop. I really
don't know. But when/if that happen, then may be a system could be not
usable. Just speculate here.
But also I wonder IF now you may have a mix of FFS1 and FSS2 partitions
as well, possibly create issue if the system needs to clean up partition
on lost of power and check each one?
Some more knowledgeable would know for sure.
So if that's NOT using FFS2 type, the new defaults, it may be wise to
re-install. I know, we all try to avoid that when possible and
sysupgrade is a welcome tools to not have to do this.
I just wonder if by may be upgraded older version of 6.7 before and now
do the full upgrade to 7.4 and specially have resize partition and used
newfs, IF you may have a mix of FFS1 and FFS2 on your drive and IF that
may not create issue in the future?
Run good now obviously, just wonder down the road. Always better to
eliminate issues before they show up.
One way to know if to simply check and see.
Here example form two different system using FFS1 and FFS2, and you can
check individual partitions to see as well like below:
The rsd3a below is your drive and here it is a softraid as well, but you
know from checking your system what partitions you have:
$ df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Capacity Mounted on
/dev/sd3a 509M 74.8M 409M 15% /
/dev/sd3j 206G 98.7G 96.8G 51% /home
/dev/sd3d 1001M 106K 950M 0% /tmp
/dev/sd3g 2.0G 368M 1.5G 19% /usr
/dev/sd3h 1001M 200M 750M 21% /usr/X11R6
/dev/sd3i 9.8G 207M 9.1G 2% /usr/local
/dev/sd3e 9.8G 267M 9.1G 3% /var
/dev/sd3f 1001M 16.2M 934M 2% /var/log
And you can check the default file system use as below.
May be, I don't know if that's possible to have a mix after you do a
newfs on your resize partitions, but I thought that may be it might be
useful in the future in case some weird issues comes up because of it
and pointing out that may be a clean install may be safer ONLY because
of the default changed in 6.7 from FFS1 to FFS2.
$ doas dumpfs /dev/rsd3a | head -1
magic 11954 (FFS1) time Wed Nov 15 01:31:12 2023
$ doas dumpfs /dev/rsd3d | head -1
magic 11954 (FFS1) time Wed Nov 15 18:27:56 2023
$ doas dumpfs /dev/rsd3e | head -1
magic 11954 (FFS1) time Wed Nov 15 18:43:30 2023
$ doas dumpfs /dev/rsd3f | head -1
magic 11954 (FFS1) time Wed Nov 15 18:40:29 2023
$ doas dumpfs /dev/rsd3g | head -1
magic 11954 (FFS1) time Sat Nov 11 03:30:14 2023
$ doas dumpfs /dev/rsd3h | head -1
magic 11954 (FFS1) time Sat Nov 11 03:30:22 2023
Or on a new installed one, not use for anything, and small drive as well
here, but ready to be in case it's needed for something in emergency.
ready-0-75$ df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Capacity Mounted on
/dev/wd0a 492M 62.6M 405M 14% /
/dev/wd0i 52.3G 2.0K 49.7G 1% /free
/dev/wd0h 986M 22.0K 937M 1% /home
/dev/wd0d 986M 10.0K 937M 1% /tmp
/dev/wd0g 4.8G 1.1G 3.5G 24% /usr
/dev/wd0e 9.7G 8.0M 9.2G 1% /var
/dev/wd0f 986M 35.1M 902M 4% /var/log
Checking the file system use here will show you the FFS2 type.
ready-0-75$ doas dumpfs /dev/rwd0a | head -1
magic 19540119 (FFS2) time Wed Nov 15 18:55:57 2023
ready-0-75$ doas dumpfs /dev/rwd0d | head -1
magic 19540119 (FFS2) time Wed Nov 15 18:55:45 2023
... etc for each partitions.
May be this is absolutely nothing, or may be it could become something
in the future. I don't know. I would be curious to know anyway.
But you can sure do a quick test like above and see for sure.
And may be someone with more knowledge might chime in to say, this is
stupid form me to worry about, or may be there might be something down
the road as well. I learn long ago to try to think of what might happen
and prepare for it, oppose to try to fix what happened and be stuck. (;
Just thought to send you this as I saw your emails and your help in the
pass was GREATLY appreciated and the minimum I could do is just say hi,
if nothing else. (;
And may be this might make a different for you now, or in the future, or
not.
I would be curios anyway to know for sure if your resize of partition
and the use of newfs, if your system was using FFS1 created them as the
new default as FFS2?
May be if it was a continuous upgrade from before 6.7, you might have a
mix of partition types now. It's not like the system can't support
different partition type anyway. But something to may be think about
just in case and the pros/cons of each one.
Thanks,
Daniel
On 11/15/23 5:12 PM, Austin Hook wrote:
Just finished the series of incremental upgrades of my farmhouse "home
office" system from 6.8 to 7.4.
Finally am current for the first time in years! And I am amazed and
grateful for the all the incredible work the developers and leadership
have done. The sysupgrade process got smoother and smother with each
incremental release.
I had been used to the gotchas in the upgrading process from years ago,
even though the sysupgrade method had well become the norm by 6.8. I
still was a bit too gun shy to upgrade for some years, since I normally
have so little time to really dig into the inner workings of OpenBSD to
figure out gotchas at upgrade time.
The only scary point was when after one of the upgrades, a "pkg_add -u"
overfilled my /usr/local and the process aborted before finishing.
So I did a bit of searching and found an article on reddit addressing that
problem by deleting the /src and /obj partitions (i and j, I think they
were), which follow /usr/local (partition h), and then expanding
/usr/local.
/src and /obj are not necessary unless one is recompiling the system.
Regretted a bit, seeing them go, but all these years, never really had the
time to dig as deep into OpenBSD as I would have wished.
The article suggested, doing a "df", then doing the arithmetic on the
sizes of i and j and adding the freed space to h, using disklabel
carefully. Nest step was to be doing a "growfs" on h. But the latter
didn't work for me, for reasons I wasn't able to quickly figure out.
For many years I only did any kind of backup using tar and ./tgz's, and
never had learned to do dump and restore. But it looked like it was time
to learn how to use dump and restore now, and then dump /usr/local onto a
big additional partition I usually add to my install which I call
/backups.
Thank goodness for the age of terabyte hard drives. Could have mounted a
USB hard drive, and used that instead, but there was room enough in my
extra partition, so long as I didn't screw up everything, like the whole
partition table on disk!
Anyway, so I did that, just deleted /usr/local and rebuilt it with
disklabel and the greater size parameter. Then I made it pristine with a
newfs. Next step was to "restore" the dump I had made.
Wow, that works great. I didn't realize that it would preserve all the
links as well. What did I ever do without it!
OK, so back to restarting "pkg_add -u" and let 'er rip.
Seemed to Work!
Continued the incremental sysupgrades.
Now I am running 7.4 happily. Did an df and see that /usr/local is filled
to 89%. Obviously I should spend some time deleting packages I no longer
use.
Only thing that disappoints me it that it looks like, from the package
update process, that maxima is discontinued. It was the one package I
most rely on, for doing math for my studies of quantum computing. I'll
dig deeper later.
One little glitch from all the process is that somehow I must have lost a
file or failed to delete a file that has something to do the default
character set files or pointers for xterm under "fvwm". A new xterm
starts automatically in a super super small font. Can't even read it.
Control-right-mouse on an xterm gives the menu for selecting the font size
and also the choice of using Truetype fonts, which works, OK, but I have
to do it each time I open a new xterm.
I also notice that when I start up xclock, it also comes up with a very
tiny font to small to read. I usually call it up with:
xclock -d -render -twelve -strftime "%A %d %
and put it at the top right hand corner of my big screen.
Maybe now I have to to add a parameter for the font size or something.
Perhaps something similar for xterm itself. Will have a little extra job
to figure what that's all about, and also to perhaps to change some
defaults for xterm.
Other than that, everything else seems to work perfectly!
Now I can do the same in downtown Milk River. Still have what remains of
the Computer Shop of Calgary working there, and my mail server is there
too. Looks like that might be a bit more touchy with a number changes to
the SMPT driver and setup. But I guess I can deal with it.
Thanks guys!
Austin
