upgrading form 4.2 to 5.x

[epilogue]

On Sat, 17 Jul 2004 14:50:13 +0200
Remko Lodder <remko at elvandar.org> wrote:

> Brent Bailey wrote:
> 
> > Hello,
> > My company has been asked to help with the upgrade of several Freebsd
> > systems that are pretty old. The customer is running a file server
> > samba also running apache running FBSD 4.2,  he wants to upgrade using
> > cvsup & the make buildworld procedure to upgrade to 5.x. Im very
> > familier with the make buildworld procedure however there have been
> > significant changes between 4.2 & 5.x  so is this something that can be
> > done without many problems ?

hello brent,

though i don't know anyone who has gone this route, i imagine it is
possible.  the reason most people don't cvsup from 4.x to 5.x is because
there is a fundamental change in the filesystem (details of which escape me
now - check the release notes at freebsd.org).  by simply cvsupping, you
will _not_ be able to take advantage of the new filesystem.

if your customer insists upon 5.x, it would probably be best to prepare a
full back-up then:

a) take the machine down, make a fresh install of 5.x, then load back data.

b) build and configure a parallel 5.x machine, load it with the backed-up
data, then find a new use for the 4.x series machine.

hth.


cheers,
epi

> > Aside from reading throught the /usr/src/UPDATING file are
> > there things i should look out for being that the 2 versions are so
> > differrent.
> > 
> > personally i would recommend going to the lastest stable release
> > 4.10-p2
> > 
> > I welcome this lists thoughts & opions on this matter
> > 
> > thank in advance for any help :-)
> 
> Hey Brent,
> 
> FreeBSD 5.x has not yet been described as production release ready.
> So your customer is best advised to use the 4.x branch, and indeed at 
> the moment that is 4.10 (and the patches afterwards ofcourse).
> 
> However i am running FreeBSD 5.x as production server in 2 colocated 
> boxes without any problems. So it does not mean that it's crashing all 
> the time, but there might be bugs that can cause downtime for your 
> customer, and he should be willing to risk that problem if you want to 
> upgrade to 5.x. If he prefers stablitity, and little downtime you do 
> best to upgrade to the latest 4 release with patches.
> 
> Since it's a very long while back that i runned 4.x (4.3 ...) i can't 
> remember anymore what the huge differences are, perhaps someone else can 
> describe that to you.
> 
> Cheers!
> 
> -- 
> Kind regards,
> 
> Remko Lodder                   |remko at elvandar.org
> Reporter DSINet                |remko at dsinet.org
> Projectleader Mostly-Harmless  |remko at mostly-harmless.nl
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