Should I Upgrade 5.4 -> 6.2?

[Tamouh H.]

> 
> First off, I want to thank the people who responded to my 
> thread "Stability Issues on a 5.4-RELEASE box" a couple of 
> weeks ago; after disabling hyperthreading, getting a clean 
> run of Memtest back, and doing some serious fsck'ing of the 
> disks, the box appears to now be completely stable. I'm still 
> not sure which of the above fixed the problem...but I'll take 
> a stable system at this point. :-)
> 
> That said, in that thread I had asked about the advisability 
> of upgrading to 6.2, and it was intelligently pointed out 
> that doing so in pursuit of stability was a bad idea. Now 
> that the box is stable, though, I'm back to the same 
> question: should I make the upgrade, and if so, how should I do it?
> 
> My primary driver for doing so would be to keep current 
> enough that I'm still getting security and other patches on a 
> regular basis, and that I can upgrade my applications from 
> ports as necessary. If this is not an issue, then my only 
> remaining concern would be that it's usually easier to get 
> support on lists like this if you're running a modern version 
> of the OS (that's certainly the case with the OpenBSD folks).
> 
> My primary concern with upgrading is that the box is in 
> Portland, OR, and I'm in Arlington, VA...and while the ISP is 
> friendly, I doubt that I could count on them for major system 
> recovery if I botch something during the upgrade. My other 
> worry is that I don't want to break existing apps if possible 
> (the main one I'm concerned about is Zope/Plone). This is a 
> production box with moderate traffic, and it would be a 
> problem if there was extensive downtime.
> 
> Is it worth upgrading? If so, what's the best way to do so -- 
> CVSup, or some other way? Are there any major caveats if I do 
> choose to upgrade (or choose to stay with the existing OS)?
> 
> Thanks,
> Alex Kirk
> 

If it is not broken, don't try to fix it! We had to upgrade from 5.4 to 6.1 because the performance was not good, crashing issues...etc.

I advise my clients not to upgrade unless they have a performance or stability issue they are looking to resolve.

However, should you decide to upgrade; as everyone had said: backup! backup! backup!

Also, find a local service company in the city to call upon should the upgrade goes bad. We've upgraded many FBSD 5.4 to 6.1 with no problems and have always been able to SSH back to the box.

Tamouh