Newbie Question About System Update

[Kevin Oberman]

> Date: Tue, 19 Apr 2005 09:28:39 -0400
> From: Bill Moran <wmoran at potentialtech.com>
> Sender: owner-freebsd-stable at freebsd.org
> 
> Jim Campbell <jim-c at charter.net> wrote:
> 
> > I've been away from *NIX a few years.  I have been playing with FreeBSD 
> > for a week or so now with mixed results.  I am using release 4.11 
> > because for some reason 5.3 has problems seeing my hard drives.  4.11, 
> > Red Hat Linux and NetBSD have no such trouble.
> > 
> > This afternoon I used the "Updating Sources with CVSup" in the FreeBSD 
> > Cheat Sheets and everything worked as advertized.  I believe that it 
> > advised against using "make world" and suggested that I use "19.4.1 The 
> > Canonical Way to Update Your System" in the Handbook.  I went through 
> > the following steps with no problem:
> > 
> >  # make buildworld
> >  # make installworld
> >  # mergemaster
> >  # reboot
> 
> This is not correct, and this is not what 19.4.1 says.  The correct
> procedure is as Mike Schultz described.  Please review that section of
> the handbook.
> 
> If you did, indeed, do as you described, then you have a world that's
> out of sync with your kernel.  Try this:
> 1) Boot in to single user mode
> 2) fsck
> 3) mount -a
> 4) cd /usr/src
> 5) make buildkernel
> 6) make installkernel
> 7) reboot
> 
> If you're unable to complete those steps, then you may be better off
> reinstalling and trying again - write it off as part of the learning
> process.  There are ways to restore your system if you've made this
> mistake and the above doesn't work, but it's rather advanced stuff.

The right answer is to read and follow the instructions in
/usr/src/UPDATING. (They are near the bottom of the file.)

The list above missed adjkerntz (not needed if the hardware clock is
running UTC). Adding swapon -a is a good safety net, too. I was
recently bitten when I forgot.

But rather then generate more poor or incomplete examples for people to
trip over, the canonical answer should be to follow the instructions in
UPDATING. 
-- 
R. Kevin Oberman, Network Engineer
Energy Sciences Network (ESnet)
Ernest O. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab)
E-mail: oberman at es.net			Phone: +1 510 486-8634