Migrating to a newer version of FreeBSD

Tony Shadwick tshadwick at goinet.com
Fri May 13 16:12:34 PDT 2005


I see two ways you can go about this:

1.  Get your radius conf file, and your /etc/master.passwd file.  Build a 
new FreeBSD 5.4 server.

Install the following from ports:

- portinstall
- portmanager
- portupgrade
- portdowngrade
- freebsd-update

Update your ports and src via cvsup.  Install your radius server.  Load 
your conf file.  The easiest way to install all of your users on the new 
box is going to be to cp master.passwd to the clipboard, run vipw, type i, 
(paste), :wq.  Note that this isn't perfect because it won't create home 
directories, and there will be system users in there too.  On second 
thought, only copy your 'real' users to the clipboard.  Leave the system 
users behind.  NFS export your /home on the old box, mount it on the new 
one, cp -pr to the new /home on your new system.

Make a cron entry to cvsup ports, and set up freebsd update.  Those two 
things will keep you from falling too far behind.  Also run portmanager 
-s on a regular basis to keep yourself current.

When you're comfortable that all is as it should be, assign the old box's 
IP address to the new one, and keep an eye on the logs.  If something goes 
wrong, switch back and troubleshoot.

The other option is to cvsup your ports with tag=., and src tag=RELENG_5_4 
or RELENG_4_11.  Follow the make world instructions, then after that is 
done, go back and install portmanager using pkg_add -r, and do a 
portmanager -u (presuming that you didn't have an custom flags during any 
of your compiles.  If not, then make appopriate entires in /etc/make.conf 
before doing this).  portmanager -u is going to take forever and a day to 
run.  You've been warned.  If this is a really old and slow box, I 
wouldn't even consider going this route.

Tony

On Fri, 13 May 2005, Lisa Casey wrote:

> Hi Folks,
>
> I have had a Redhat box that was running my radius authentication and 
> sendmail. Several weeks ago the hard drive in this box crashed. Naturally :-( 
> I didn't have a backup. This created an emergency - my users could not get 
> authenticated and could not get email. I didn't have time to solve this 
> problem nicely, so this is what I did.
>
> I had another computer that I had installed FreeBSD 4.6 on some time ago but 
> wasn't using for anything. So I hastily installed a radius server, sendmail 
> and qpopper on it. Fortunately I had a copy of my radius users file, but we 
> had to recreate all of the users on the box  for mail.
>
> Right now my problems are:
>
> 1) The version of FreeBSD is just too old. The ports are old and I just 
> cannot seem to just download newer ports and install them.
>
> 2) The hard drive on this box is too small. I never intended to use it as a 
> mail server wehen I set it up, so my var is just way too small.
>
> I have a new large hard drive  I purchased. I intended to install this drive 
> as a slave drive in this box and copy everything over to it using dump & 
> restore following the procedure at: 
> http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/faq/disks.html#NEW-HUGE-DISK
>
> I need to think about this and do it right this time. Doing things in a hurry 
> on an emergency basis just causes grief. I don't want to keep the FreeBSD 4.6 
> for obvious reasons. I'm pretty sure I cannot install a 5 version of FreeBSD 
> on the new drive then dump/restore things over to it.
>
> So here's what I was thinking about doing  I just ordered a copy of FreeBSD 
> 5.3  I can install the 5.3 on the new drive and get radius authentication 
> working on that one quickly and easily. The email is going to be more of a 
> problem since users currently have mail in their mail boxes on the 4.6 box 
> and, of course, new mail comes in all the time. I can go ahead and get 
> Sendmail and Qpopper set up on this new 5.3 box.  What do you think will be 
> the best way to migrate the mailboxes over to it so as to cause our users as 
> little grief as possible? Since that old redhat drive crashed our users have 
> experienced a fair amount of problems and I'ld like to minimize that as much 
> as I can on this new transition.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Lisa Casey
>
>
>
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