Patches &Upgrades

[Matthew Seaman]

On Wed, Oct 15, 2003 at 12:56:06PM -0400, Marco Greene wrote:
> New to FreeBSD.  Have looked through the documentation at length and have 
> figure almost everything out that I am trying to use but have a few 
> questions.  Have been working with other versions of UNIX, mainly Solaris 
> and AIX.  We have 4 servers running production using 4.2 and I have been 
> testing the upgrade procedure that is documented.
> 
> I have tried:
> cvsup...make buildworld...make installworld.  Took a long time but it 
> seemed to work...however, when I rebooted, still said 4.2...I was expecting 
> 4.8.  How can you confirm current version of FreeBSD.  Shouldn't it say 4.8?

Err... What exactly said '4.2?' The version number line near the top
of the /var/run/dmesg.boot output or the result of 'uname -r' should
be considered authoritative, and if that is still saying 4.2 then it
seems that your attempt to upgrade has gone somewhat awry.

I note that you don't mention updating the kernel -- which is probably
just economy of typing, but you should know that you can't upgrade the
'world' independently of the kernel.  In fact, on due consideration,
not upgrading the kernel would result in the symptoms you're seeing.
If that is what you've managed to do, then you'll find that various
small but important programs like 'ps' and 'top' fail to work and
there can be various other unfortunate effects which may not be
immediately apparent.
 
> I also tried the CD upgrade process...didn't work...when it tried to start 
> installing the distribution it said that it couldn't mount the cd onto 
> /dist.  Installing from this particular CD seems to work fine.  However, 
> booting from the CD and doing an upgrade seems a little strange.
> 
> Now about patches...
> You don't seem to download patches the way you do for Solaris or AIX.  It 
> looks like you have to do the cvsup...make buildworld and make installworld 
> thing. This seems like a risky way to do patch installs.  Are there 
> pre-packaged binary patches available and if so what is the patching 
> mechanism that should be used.

Take a look at http://www.daemonology.net/freebsd-update/ which does
provide precisely the binary patches you want, although it requires
that you start with one of the release versions installed from CD Rom
*without* locally recompiling the sources.

I'd contend that upgrading from source is no more risky than upgrading
using binary patches, and quite possibly the converse.  Each has it's
advantages and disadvantages

	Cheers,

	Matthew

-- 
Dr Matthew J Seaman MA, D.Phil.                       26 The Paddocks
                                                      Savill Way
PGP: http://www.infracaninophile.co.uk/pgpkey         Marlow
Tel: +44 1628 476614                                  Bucks., SL7 1TH UK
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