Upgrading to 4.9 CVS vs. binary?

[Alex de Kruijff]

On Tue, Sep 23, 2003 at 10:26:54AM -0700, Scott Schappell wrote:
> It seems that 4.9 is rapidly on its way to becoming RELEASE, which is a good
> thing.  I'm currently running 4.8-p3 on my production server, and I don't
> have a spare to build then move over, so it will be an in place upgrade.

Do you have a FreeBSD workstation of some sort? If so set up the system
so it shared the /usr/src and /usr/obj with the production machine and
try a upgrade of that one before doing it with you production server.
This will give you more reason to assume that the upgrade will not fail
on the production server.

> Which upgrade path would be the best? CVS or installing from a binary ISO
> CD?

The CVS option has the advante that you gain the lasted fixes to thing.
If something broke on the ISO changes are that its fixed in the CVS.

> If CVS, I'm assuming I need to add *default  tag=RELENG_4_9  when it's
> released to my cvsup file to grab it, or do I need to start tracking
> stable RELENG_4?

Its far better to go with RELENG_4_9. RELENG_4 is less stable because
the new stuf get tried out here first. The posiblity exist that it
doesn't work.

> My hunch is CVS will be the better way to do it, and the last time I tried
> upgrading the system with a binary, it exploded (learned then don't do a
> binary upgrade when it's running the kernel and multiuser, thank god for
> backups).
> 
> What is the recommendation of folks on this list?

You may want to wait two week to see if other are reporting problems to
the stable list. Then downloaded the sources of two weeks ago and use
them to upgrade you system. This limit the changes of getting burned
quite a bit.

-- 
Alex

Articles based on solutions that I use:
http://www.kruijff.org/alex/index.php?dir=docs/FreeBSD/