safest way to upgrade a production server

[DA Forsyth]

On 8 Sep 2008 , freebsd-questions-request at freebsd.org entreated about
 "freebsd-questions Digest, Vol 232, Issue 3":

> >> FreeBSD ***servername*** 6.3-PRERELEASE FreeBSD 6.3-PRERELEASE #1:
> >> Mon Dec  3 09:46:53 EST 2007     root@***servername***:/usr/obj/usr/
> >> src/sys/INET_ON  amd64
> >
> > oooh, that is a bit old I think.
> 
> I chose this server as an example, because it's the oldest one. I  
> didn't install the OS on this server, the vendor did. Not sure why  
> they chose a prerelease version... perhaps 6.3 was almost ready to go  
> and they wanted to put us on the 6.3 branch? I don't know.

maybe 6.3 had the drivers for the motherboard?   I had that - I 
purchased a nice shiny newmotherbaord in 2007 but could not use it 
before 7.0R came out as the chips were not supported by 6.x.  I chose 
not to use a CURRENT or RC version of 7, but to just wait.

> Anyway, I guess what I should do is patch this to the latest 6.3  
> version?

yes.

> Or should I go to the latest 6.x version? I am pretty sure I don't  
> want to experiment with a 7.x upgrade.

6.3 is the latest 6 verison (-:


--
       DA Fo rsyth            Network Supervisor
Principal Technical Officer -- Institute for Water Research
http://www.ru.ac.za/institutes/iwr/