Upgrade to 4.8 RELEASE
Robert H. Perry
rperry4 at earthlink.net
Mon Oct 20 20:23:56 PDT 2003
>>Hello,
>>
>>I'm making plans to upgrade from 4.7 RELEASE to 4.8 RELEASE. My
>>previous attempt was a binary upgrade from 4.5 to 4.7 which did not go
>>very well. I eventually purchased the 4.7 CD.
>>
>>The FreeBSD Handbook stresses backing up the system and implies that
>>/dump/ is a better backup program. Chapter 12.9.8.1 of the handbook
>>recommends having a copy of the boot and fixit floppies available and
>>making sure they have all your devices, otherwise you'll need to prepare
>>two bootable custom floppies that contain /fdisk, disklabel, newfs,
>>mount, /and your backup program. It goes on to say that these programs
>>must be statically linked. I understand hard and soft links but I'm not
>>familiar with static links. The handbook also provides a script for
>>creatinng a bootable floppy.
>>
>>
>
>A static link is a firm link:) Seriously, static linking has nothing to
>do with filesystem links. A statically linked program just uses no
>shared libraries. AFAICT the programs in /stand (and /bin and /sbin) are
>statically linked (note that those in /stand are also a "crunchbox",
>that is, a single "monolithic" program which runs differently depending
>on the name it was run as). You really have to mess with this only if
>you are going to write your own program to run from a boot floppy.
>
>You can use file(1) if you want to see if a program is staticlally linked:
>
>$ file /usr/bin/find
>/usr/bin/find: ELF 32-bit LSB executable, Intel 80386, version 1 (FreeBSD), for FreeBSD 4.8, dynamically linked (uses shared libs), stripped
>$ file /stand/find
>/stand/find: ELF 32-bit LSB executable, Intel 80386, version 1 (FreeBSD), for FreeBSD 4.8, statically linked, stripped
>
Thanks for the education Sergey. This makes a lot more sense now.
I never prepared a boot floppy when I initially installed 4.7 so I
thought the handbook was suggesting a necessary alternative (?). If
it's not absolutely necessary, I'll skip it.
Any suggestions relative to the upgrade process is also appreciated.
>
>In fact, a source update isn't as dangerous as you expect.
>
That's what I've heard and I suspect you're right. However, AFAICT,
past failures have usually come as a result of not following the
handbook. Maybe this floppy is a bit of overkill though.
Thanks again.
Bob
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