Upgrading FreeBSD to a new release

[Remko Lodder]

Hey Roman,

Roman Kennke wrote:

> Hi list,
> 
> One thing, that is making me _not_ using FreeBSD is, that I see no way
> to easily upgrade from, say 5.1 to 5.2 (just an example), over network.
> I mean, I have a server running, to which I have no physical access. The
> only way to maintain it, is over SSH.
> The upgrade instructions in INSTALL.txt suggest putting in the CD, and
> using sysinstall for a binary upgrade. That is no option for me.
> 
> What I am looking for is an upgrade method which
> - can be used over an SSH connection
> - is not too difficult (like manually placing each piece in the right
> place)
> - does not leave old stuff on the HD (like the sysinstall method does,
> AFAIK)
> 
> ... to make it short, something like the ports system (especially
> portupgrade) does with non-system apps would be cool.

I use CVSup to update my system and then rebuild as described in the 
/usr/src/Makefile file, (yeah yeah there is a UPDATING file on should 
follow), the only thing that i am not doing, since i dont have physical 
access as well, is boot into single user mode and run mergemaster, 
mostly i am keen of knowing what changes , so far on my 5.x servers 
there weren't any issue's requiring mergemaster to run.

Apart from that i updated my systems many times, without being in single 
user mode, with an ssh connection.

Hope this helps a bit..

ow yeah

/usr/ports/net/cvsup-without-gui is where the cvsup lives :)

Cheers

> 
> Is there a way to achieve that? This would be the one bit, which would
> make me switch to FreeBSD.
> 
> /Roman
> 

-- 


Kind regards,

Remko Lodder
Elvandar.org/DSINet.org
www.mostly-harmless.nl Dutch community for helping newcomers on the 
hackerscene