Upgrading 5.3 to 5.4

[Toni Schmidbauer]

On Mon, Jun 20, 2005 at 06:00:34PM -0600, Cartoon Factory wrote:
> I am a fairly novice user of FreeBSD. I just recently built two boxes with
> 5.3, and now that 5.4 is out, I was curious how easy it would be to upgrade.
> The "Migration" guide deals with 4.X => 5... do I essentially follow the
> Source upgrade instructions? Is there a better/easier (for a novice!) way to
> do this, especially since I am already at 5.3? These boxes are active
> servers- how long would I be down? Is it even advisable for me to try this?

there should be no problems upgrading from 5.3 to 5.4. while building
userland / kernel and installing the kernel no downtime is
necessary. it's always advisable to try the update first on a
test system, even when this is your first time updating a
freebsd system. downtime depends on how fast your servers are and
how careful your are answering to mergemaster. on my athlon64 3200 rebooting + 
installworld + mergemaster takes about 15 minutes. 

read the following sections in the fabulous handbook:

http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/makeworld.html,

http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/cvsup.html 

and finally

http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/cvs-tags.html

so to upgrade to 5.4 tag=RELENG_5_4 is your friend.

to give a short summary:

0) su - root
1) cd /usr/src
2) cvsup -g -L2 <your supfile here> || make update (see make.conf)
2.1) READ UPDATING

3) rm -rf /usr/obj/*
4) make buildworld
5) make buildkernel
6) make installkernel
7) reboot to singlelooser mode
8) mount -a
9) mergemaster -p
10) cd /usr/src && make installworld
11) mergemaster
12) exit || reboot (to be sure everything works).

but please, read the documentation mentioned above BEFORE
starting your update, i'll give no warranty :-)!
 
hth,
toni
-- 
Wer es einmal so weit gebracht hat, dass er nicht | toni at stderror dot at
mehr irrt, der hat auch zu arbeiten aufgehoert    | Toni Schmidbauer
-- Max Planck                                     |