Should I Upgrade 5.4 -> 6.2?

alex at schnarff.com alex at schnarff.com
Fri Mar 16 11:29:13 UTC 2007


Quoting Kris Kennaway <kris at obsecurity.org>:

> 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/ ;)

Thanks everyone for the replies. Lucky for me, I just had a benefactor 
pop up and offer to pay for a new machine, which will allow me to lay 
the OS down cleanly and then use the existing system as a backup/test 
lab in the future. So thank heavens, the point is essentially moot. :-)

Alex Kirk



More information about the freebsd-questions mailing list