upgrading a dozen of servers from 7.0 to 8.1

[Odhiambo Washington]

On Fri, Jan 21, 2011 at 4:54 PM, Radomskiy Yuriy <yurius.r at yandex.ua> wrote:

> Hello!
>
> I have around 15 servers running FreeBSD 7.0 across the country.
> I would like to upgrade them to 7.3 or even 8.1 using binary updates.
> They are primary mail servers all running apache-2.0 + php5-5.2.10,
> mysql-server-5.1, exim-4.69, dovecot-1.1
> They are almost identical - they were identical a couple of years ago, but
> now they have some minor differences (soft, settings, scripts)
> Hardware is all the same.
> All the servers are in production.
>
> The steps I have to do and the questions about them i have:
> 1. update all soft to current versions (including change of config files)
> apache - goto v2.2
> php - goto v5.3
> mysql - stick with 5.1
> exim - goto 4.73
> dovecot - goto 1.2.16
> q's:
> how can upgrading to apache 2.2 + php5.3 be done with minimal downtime?
>

portupgrade -o lang/php52 lang/php5

That will upgrade your php from 5.2.10 to 5.2.17. Please stick with
php-5.2.x unless you are sure php-5.3 will not break some web apps you are
running.

upgrade php-extensions the same way.


can i upgrade or is it better to rebuild it from the scratch (because of
> major version changes)?
>


You can upgrade. Please follow the instructions from
http://people.freebsd.org/~rse/upgrade/freebsd-upgrade-7x-8x.txt<http://people.freebsd.org/%7Erse/upgrade/freebsd-upgrade-7x-8x.txt>

Just note one thing I noticed while upgrading my servers:

s/compat7x-`uname -m`-7.2.702000.200906.1.tbz/compat7x-`uname
-m`-7.3.703000.201008.tbz/g




> 2. do a binary upgrade of OS according to handbook
> http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/updating-upgrading-freebsdupdate.html
>

You can do that, but I personally prefer
http://people.freebsd.org/~rse/upgrade/freebsd-upgrade-7x-8x.txt<http://people.freebsd.org/%7Erse/upgrade/freebsd-upgrade-7x-8x.txt>.
I have never used freebsd-update on any system I run, but that is out of
choice, not any other reason!



>
> 3. rebuil all the software again
> portupgrade -af
>

If you follow
http://people.freebsd.org/~rse/upgrade/freebsd-upgrade-7x-8x.txt<http://people.freebsd.org/%7Erse/upgrade/freebsd-upgrade-7x-8x.txt>,
there will not be any urgency in doing portupgrade -af.



>
> I have two scenarios for this:
> I.
> 1. restore a server from a backup on a dedicated machine.
> 2. do all the upgrade procedures on this dedicated server.
> 3. clone this upgraded server to the original server.
> 4. Repeat this procedure for each server.
> Advantages:
>  - almost garanteed reliability.
> Disadvantages:
>  - need to sync data from the last backup with current one.
>  - takes very long time.
>
>
Too tedious!!



> II.
> 1. restore one server from backup on a dedicated machine.
> 2. do all the upgrade procedures on this restored server.
> 3. write some sort of script that does the upgrate (or makes it easier).
> 4. upgrate all the servers (since they are almost identical) one at a time.
> Advantages:
>  - should be faster
> Disadvantages:
>  - something might go wrong on some particular server(s).
>

Too tedious!!



> Which method would you sudgest?
>


As I suggested above!!


> Is there any other method or maybe enhancements ones to do the upgrade?
>

??


> How can it be used that all servers are almost identical?
>

Using RSE's methods, your servers will remain as identical as they are now.
Only you will end up running FreeBSD 8.x :-)



> How can the process be automated?
>

Unattended? Never for a server!!!
Scripted?? By RSE!!


> Should i be looking into building binary packages of required software and
> redistributing them to the servers instead of building them from the ports
> tree (as it is done now)?
>
>
No.

-- 
Best regards,
Odhiambo WASHINGTON,
Nairobi,KE
+254733744121/+254722743223
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
Damn!!