Best practices for remote upgrade?

[Scott Harrison]

On May 9, 2006, at 12:56 , Hans Lambermont wrote:

> David Wolfskill wrote:
>
>> On Mon, May 08, 2006 at 02:29:23PM +0200, Scott Harrison wrote:
>>> 	I have some 4.x servers that I would like to upgrade to 5.x, and
>>> perhaps 6.x.  However, I do not have any local access to these
>>> machines.  I can ssh into them only.  I would like to know  
>>> whether it
>>> is possible for me to upgrade the machines with only ssh access, and
>>> what one should do to go about upgrading them.
> ...
>> I then have little shell scripts to use "dump | restore" to  
>> "clone" the
>> file systems from one slice to the other.
> ...
>> * Reboot from the "other" slice (the target of the above operation).
>> * Upgrade in place.
>> * Reboot (without changing active slice).
>
> I do almost the same; I do not reboot to the other slice to upgrade  
> it,
> instead I use the current slice to upgrade, and if that fails  
> reboot to
> the other slice (the backup slice). It's the same idea, with one less
> reboot.
>
> This dual-boot-slice (or disk :) setup also allows for the UFS->UFS2
> transition.
>

	This sounds nice except that I do not have my disk already  
partitioned like this.  Can I take a 4.7 machine (for example) and  
live repartition it to be like this?

-- 
·�������� ·������������	Scott Harrison