It's time to bite the bullet and do a major upgrade from 4.11 to 6.0

[John Nielsen]

On Wednesday 15 November 2006 02:54, Jonathan McKeown wrote:
> On Tuesday 14 November 2006 18:13, Scott Schappell wrote:
> > The writing is on the wall and all that stuff. I've put this off long
> > enough.
> >
> > What needs to be done to upgrade from 4.11 to 6.x?  I have an extensive
> > amount of ports installed and in googling and searching the list, it
> > seems I need to make a jump to 5.2 then from there to 6.
>
> I'm about to do this, but I've opted for a clean install, as others have
> suggested - but with a twist.
>
> I've installed an additional drive the same size as the original (80GB) -
> I'm going to install on the new drive, transplant data as needed from the
> old drive, and when I'm happy with everything, use gmirror to turn both
> drives into a little RAID-1 plex.

Do yourself a favor and create the mirror before you get started. To begin 
with you'll only add the new drive as a member, then once you've copied 
everything over you insert the old drive.

It is possible to convert "regular" devices into gmirror members after they 
have data on them, but unless you're extremely careful there's a small risk 
of the gmirror metadata sector overlapping a data sector.

> I'm also trying to do it remotely, with ssh access to the distant box and
> one right next to it, and a null-modem cable between them to give me serial
> console access during the upgrade. If it works I'll detail the steps here,
> as I wasn't able to find a quick and easy guide to this process anywhere.

I'd suggest playing around with gmirror locally first. In particular, make 
sure that whatever partitioning scheme you come up with using gmirror will 
boot. (I haven't had any problems with this, but it's a good 
anti-foot-shooting measuer) Also be very sure that the old drive is not 
smaller than the new drive. (If it is, then just shave some space off the 
device you're using to create the mirror on the new drive).

JN