advice on upgrading production FreeBSD 5.4

[Andrew Pantyukhin]

On 2/26/06, pobox at verysmall.org <pobox at verysmall.org> wrote:
> I inherited a production FreeBSD 5.4 used as a web/mail server (Apache,
> PostgreSQL, php, qmail, vpopmail, Courier). Could anybody help me with
> information about a web resource on upgrading such system (all, OS only
> or component by component) with minimum downtime. I looked into cvsup
> and portupgrade - is this the right way for production systems or is
> there another one? For example is it possible to have the older version
> running until the new one downloads/compiles and then to replace it
> within seconds? Also - what if the new version does not work correctly -
> is it possible to keep the old and revert to it.
>
> Thank you,
> Iv
>
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First, you'd better upgrade to 6.1. Read /usr/src/UPDATING
and handbook for that.

Then use portupgrade to upgrade critical services one by
one. Most of the time it happens just as you describe it.
Sometimes a service is stopped automatically when new
binaries are installed, so you have to /usr/local/etc/rc.d/
/whatever start when you upgrade things like mysql.

Then use portupgrade -ak to upgrade the rest of your
software and ensure they look good afterwards.