Upgrading from 6.2-RELEASE?

[Damien Fleuriot]

On 19 Oct 2011, at 21:45, Kurt Buff <kurt.buff at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Wed, Oct 19, 2011 at 12:03, Chuck Swiger <cswiger at mac.com> wrote:
>> On Oct 19, 2011, at 11:55 AM, Kurt Buff wrote:
>>> I have gotten custody of an old machine running the aforementioned,
>>> and it's in production. I can take it down for a couple of hours if
>>> necessary, but would prefer to have it down as little as possible.
>> 
>> The most straightforward solution would be to build out and validate a new system running FreeBSD-7.4 or 8.2, and drop it in place of the old box.  If all is good, decommission the old hardware.
> 
> I agree. I've already got a new VM started with 8.2. I'm trying to see
> if I can migrate the data to the new host, but it's not finished yet,
> and the old box's ports aren't functioning and can't be upgraded, so
> I'm stuck in a bit of a scramble.
> 
>>> What are my options for getting it to a supported release - looking at
>>> the handbook it doesn't appear the the freebsd-update utility will
>>> work in this case, as it's not 6.3? Can I, for instance, boot from a
>>> CD of a supported version and do an upgrade, or am I stuck doing a
>>> download of sorce for 7.0-RELEASE, compiling that, and then an
>>> freebsd-update to 7.4?
>> 
>> You can do either.  However, it's probably easier to just download and burn the 7.4 or 8.2 image, and do an upgrade directly than it would be do upgrade via source to 7.0-RELEASE and then try freebsd-update.
> 
> Gotta love conflicting answers from you and Adam
> 

I'll give you more conflict.


I'd do source upgrades from 6.2 -> 6.3 -> 7.0 -> 7.4 -> 8.0 -> 8.2
Or at the very least 6.2 -> 7.0 -> (8.0 ->) 8.2
The idea here is to get to the latest stable version of a branch, then hop to the lowest version of the next one, rince/repeat.

This way, imo, you update more progressively and bit by bit.

I wouldn't be confident doing for instance 6.2 -> 8.2

And I'd be even muuuuuch less confident running binary upgrades or upgrades from CD.

I think a CD upgrade will not update your config files properly for instance.

You'll be missing new system accounts (like hast for example), you'll have extra init scripts lying around, you'll miss some, you'll miss stuff from periodic, startup script fixes...

Do not do a binary upgrade for major version hops.

Read UPDATING carefully and consider its contents take precedence over the website/handbook.