Crusty upgrade (was Make Question)

Peter Clark clarkp at mtmary.edu
Tue Jun 16 23:26:36 UTC 2009


Lowell Gilbert wrote:
> Manolis Kiagias <sonicy at otenet.gr> writes:
> 
>>> I have inherited an old FreeBSD 5.1 machine(5.1-RELEASE-p18). I
>>> realize that the short answer to my question is more than likely to
>>> upgrade the OS to a current release and I would if I had that option
>>> right now, but I do not. I needed to upgrade the perl/openssh/openssl
>>> implementation on this box. My first thought was to use the port on
>>> the machine that was from that era but make fails. So then I thought
>>> to csup the ports tree and try with a new version, that fails as well.
>>> The error is as follows:
>>>
>> 5.1 (in fact all 5.X) has reached EOL. The latest ports tree won't
>> compile stuff for 5.X.  Use the following line in your ports-supfile to
>> get the last ports tree that was supported in 5.X:
>>
>> *default release=cvs tag=RELEASE_5_EOL
>>
>> instead of
>>
>> *default release=cvs tag=.
>>
>> Still, since this is going to be really old you may still have problems
>> (missing distfiles and so on). But is worth trying if you must stay with
>> 5.X for whatever reason.
> 
> One thing it won't do is get you any of the bug fixes to the ssh port.
> 
As a number of people have pointed out this is turning into a bigger 
headache than it needs to be. The good thing is that allowed me to get 
the ok to upgrade the system. This box will be taken out of service in 
the near future but I do need it to remain functional for a couple months.

Is there a recommended upgrade path? I know about cvsup and whatnot. 
What I mean is are there some blatant gotchas when making this big a 
jump (5.1p18 -> 6.4)? Are there some recommended stops along the way or 
can it be done in one fell swoop. Is Colin Percival's freebsd-update.sh 
a viable way to approach this?
http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2007-11-11-freebsd-major-version-upgrade.html
This is a production box so I want to cover my bases before I jump into 
this.



Peter




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