FreeBSD 4.x EoL

[Jim C. Nasby]

On Wed, Oct 18, 2006 at 10:04:46PM -0500, Yoshihiro Ota wrote:
> On Wed, 18 Oct 2006 12:13:11 +0100 (BST)
> Jan Grant <jan.grant at bristol.ac.uk> wrote:
> > If you're setting up machines that you're going to be upgrading like 
> > this in the future, I think it's _really_ worthwhile hacking out a 
> > couple of "root slices" - that is, space for a second / and /usr - to 
> > facilitate this. You can run mergemaster on a secondary copy of your 
> > /etc (this, of course, requries that the contents of /etc are relatively 
> > quiescent for this step) and tidy up by hand. You can perform a dump & 
> > restore followed by a source upgrade, a fresh source install or a binary 
> > upgrade ad lib; just reboot (with nextboot) when done.
> > 
> > This also means you can keep the previous OS around for a while in case 
> > there are problems with the new one.
> > 
> > For setups that aren't amenable to automated deployments this works 
> > pretty well and gives you a safety-net for upgrades.
> 
> Good advice.  I have a few additions.
> 
> In fact, you don't need *a* partitions to boot such as ad0s1a.
> You simply need to spare a FreeBSD partition.
> 
> At boot loader, you could type:
> 
> ad(0,2,e)
> to boot "e" partition of the "2nd" slice on the first drive which is
> denoted by "0."
> 
> ad(2,2,f)
> to boot from "f" partition of the 2nd slice on the 3rd drive.
> 
> If you have lots of physical memory and swap space, you may be able
> to spare swap space for this porpuse for a moment.  In another word,
> you can disable swap device for a while and use it as a root parition.

The issue I run into is that I use software raid (vinum in 4.11, gmirror
in 6.x), and I don't know of any way to go from one to the other that
doesn't involve wiping both drives at the same time.
-- 
Jim C. Nasby, Database Architect                decibel at decibel.org 
Give your computer some brain candy! www.distributed.net Team #1828

Windows: "Where do you want to go today?"
Linux: "Where do you want to go tomorrow?"
FreeBSD: "Are you guys coming, or what?"