Should I Upgrade 5.4 -> 6.2?
Kris Kennaway
kris at obsecurity.org
Fri Mar 16 05:14:47 UTC 2007
On Thu, Mar 15, 2007 at 08:46:45PM -0700, Garrett Cooper wrote:
> Kris Kennaway wrote:
> >On Thu, Mar 15, 2007 at 05:09:57PM -0400, Jerry McAllister wrote:
> >>On Thu, Mar 15, 2007 at 04:47:06PM -0400, alex at schnarff.com wrote:
> >>
> >>>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)?
> >>You should if you can reasonably do it, for the reasons you give plus
> >>improvements in performance and in some utilities.
> >>
> >>My sentiment is usually to do a clean install over major version numbers.
> >>It tends to leave less dross laying around. but I do not have to worry
> >>about down times very much, a couple of hours at night is not terribly
> >>noticable in my stuff. It does require more time down to do a clean
> >>from scratch install. But, I think you can get away with a cvsup
> >>upgrade from 5.4 to 6.2. Then your downtime is just the reboot and
> >>stuff at single user (mergemaster), plus probably some for upgrading
> >>various ports.
> >
> >Yes, a source upgrade from 5.x to 6.x (followed by portupgrade -fa)
> >isn't too bad. As with any upgrade you do need a recovery strategy
> >though.
> >
> >Kris
>
> I agree with both Kris and Jerry. Besides, if you run 6.2 you're running
> a supported version of FreeBSD whereas 5.4 isn't supported anymore (5.5
> is the last supported version in the legacy 5.x branch). Plus there are
> slight improvements from 5.x to 6.x.
s/slight/major/ ;)
Kris
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