Upgrade v5.x to v7.0

[Ivan Voras]

Vince Sabio wrote:
> I am currently running FreeBSD v5.1 (yes, I am a Bad Person(tm)), and 
> need to update it to v7.0. Questions:
> 
> 1. Can I go straight from v5.1 to v7.0? Or do I need to make a stop at 
> v6.x?

Theoretically it might be possible but definitely not recommended. 5.1 
is very old (it's not even labeled STABLE - are you sure "FreeBSD 
updates" track such old releases?) and there might be unexpected problems.

> 2. I'm Unix shell literate with a reasonable level of Solaris sysadmin 
> experience, but have no experience (yet) with FreeBSD updates.  Is there 
> a site with step-by-step instructions for the uninitiated, to help 
> minimize Pr(failure)?
> 
> 3. Anything else I should know?

You probably don't want to do it with binary upgrades, for many reasons, 
including unexpected problems (i.e. possibility of ending up with a 
system so messed up nobody could help you restore it). Do a source 
upgrade to 6.0 then to 7.0 - it's not hard. For best effects, you need 
to also recompile all additional ports installed on the server 
(actually, you *can* run ports compiled for 5.x on 7.x but as soon as 
you need to upgrade one of them, you'll probably need to upgrade all or 
most of them because of cross-dependencies).

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