4.8 > 4.10 successful. Now > 5.x?

[Matthew Seaman]

On Wed, Aug 25, 2004 at 04:32:18PM -0700, Curtis Vaughan wrote:

> Whereas I intend to run this server as a Postfix server w/ Courier 
> IMAP, authentication through PAM/LDAP it would seem that I should stay 
> at 4.10 then.  Is this correct or not?

Correct.  4.x doesn't support nsswitch.conf, so you can't use LDAP for
your local machine accounts (well, not without pain).  However, it
does support PAM/ldap, and postfix+cyrus has been written to take
advantage of that combo, so you can certainly use LDAP to provide
virtual user accounts for your e-mail users.  Not having your e-mail
clients being able to log directly into the server would probably fall
on the side of "feature" rather than "bug" in most installations.
 
> Also, if this server goes into production, then how much of a pain in 
> the ass is it going to be to move to 5.x when it's stable?

There should be an officially sanctioned route to upgrade from
4.10-STABLE to 5.3-STABLE once 5.3-STABLE is released.  However, all
upgrades over a major version bump are painful, and as many people on
this list have said, just doing a re-install is probably your best
bet.  One very good reason for doing that is that 5.x has a new
default filesystem type: UFS2 -- of course, it can still use UFS1,
the default from 4.x; but there's no way to change a filesystem from
UFS1 to UFS2 without a wipe and reinstall.

If the continued reliability of this server is important to you
(ie. your job or your income depends on it) then I'd be even more
cautious about switching from 4.x to 5.x: since 5.2.1 came out there
have been some quite significant changes to vital parts of the 5.x
kernel, and it's likely to take a bit of time (even accounting for the
5.3 release process) before everything works in the way intended.
Monitor the freebsd-stable at ... list for news of any showstopping
problems, and if you can, experiment with 5.3-STABLE on a scratch
machine before attempting the upgrade.

4.10-RELEASE and the upcoming 4.11-RELEASE will be supported by the
FreeBSD project for quite some time (typically 1 year after the
release date), so there's no need to be in a great hurry to update
everything.

	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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