Upgrading FreeBSD to a new release

[Kent Stewart]

On Sunday 06 June 2004 02:44 pm, Remko Lodder wrote:
> 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.

This doesn't work on the upgrade to 5.2 from 5.1. You have to boot into 
single user mode to do the installworld. You have incompatible features 
at this upgrade.

Kent

>
> 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

-- 
Kent Stewart
Richland, WA

http://users.owt.com/kstewart/index.html