Remote upgrade of 4.X-5.3-Stable

[Clifton Royston]

On Thu, Feb 24, 2005 at 12:01:08PM +0000, freebsd-hackers-request at freebsd.org wrote:
> Date: Wed, 23 Feb 2005 17:06:02 +0000
> From: Wouter van Rooij <aentgood at gmail.com>
> Subject: Remote upgrade of 4.X-5.3-Stable
> To: freebsd-hackers at freebsd.org
> Message-ID: <7603e5d8050223090633360cc1 at mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII
> 
> You did a make buildworld?
> You just have to boot in single user mode and run mergemaster -p and
> mergemaster.

  This doesn't work for the remote update case without physical console
access, which he's asking about.  Once the machine comes up in single
user mode, sshd is not running and there's no way to get into it.

  Sorry to belabor the obvious.

  I believe that what's really needed here is to replicate some magic
that is done on the first boot after installing FreeBSD on a system. 
IIRC, there's a special one-time invocation of an rc file - I think
after a quick check of /etc/rc that it's rc.early that I'm thinking of.

  You can put commands in here which are run very early on following
the first automatic boot into multi-user of the system, after all
virtual drives are "assembled" but before filesystems are checked and
mounted.  If all steps of your upgrade script succeed, you can then at
the end have the rc.early file rename itself (so it won't run on the
next boot) sync the root file system, and reboot again.

  Obviously you want to test this very carefully, because in a remote
environment you will probably get just one shot at having it work
correctly; but hopefully this puts you on a workable path.
  -- Clifton

-- 
          Clifton Royston  --  cliftonr at tikitechnologies.com 
         Tiki Technologies Lead Programmer/Software Architect
"I'm gonna tell my son to grow up pretty as the grass is green
And whip-smart as the English Channel's wide..."
                                                   -- 'Whip-Smart', Liz Phair