Upgrading

[Odhiambo Washington]

On Sun, Sep 21, 2008 at 12:33 PM, Matthew Seaman
<m.seaman at infracaninophile.co.uk> wrote:
> Odhiambo Washington wrote:
>>
>> On Sun, Sep 21, 2008 at 2:29 AM, Grant Peel <gpeel at thenetnow.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> Hi all,
>>>
>>> I am preparing to upgrade all servers from FBSD 6.2 to 6.3 in preperation
>>> for 6.4, and some day 7.x
>>>
>>> One thing I have always found a little confusing is what tag to specify
>>> in
>>> the supfile.
>>>
>>> If a machine is running 6.2, and I want to upgrade to the latest
>>> production
>>> release, would I use:
>>>
>>> RELENG_6_3 ?
>>
>> RELENG_6
>>
>
> No.  RELENG_6 will give you 6-STABLE.  The OP was quite correct:
> RELENG_6_3 will get 6.3-RELEASE-pX which is currently the latest
> production release from the 6.x series.  Eventually there will be
> a RELENG_6_4 tag, but it hasn't been laid down quite yet.  That
> usually happens around when re at .. switches from 6.4-BETA to 6.4-RC
> which will probably be fairly soon.
>
>>> Also, What do you all think about jumping from 6.4 straight to 7.1 when
>>> its
>>> released (cvsup method)?
>
> If the OPs final aim is to track 7.1, then:
>
>  * upgrading 6.2 -> 6.3 -> 6.4 doesn't really get you anything
>    except a whole heap of wasted time -- unless you want practice
>    at running 'make buildworld' and so forth?
>
>  * Upgrading from 6.2 -> 7.0 directly works just fine.  I expect
>    6.2 -> 7.1 would probably work too.
>
>  * It's the 6 -> 7 jump which is the big deal in terms of what you
>    have to do while upgrading.  Rebuilding all of your installed ports
>    will take a significant amount of time, and you're going to have
>    to take the server out of action at least some of that time.
>
> Alternatively, if the aim at the moment is to track 6.4, then upgrading
> 6.2 -> 6.4 in one step will get you there pretty simply.  Just wait a
> few weeks until 6.4 is out.
>
>> Hmm.... In such cases, it will depend on what the server is running.
>> I'd prefer a fresh install and migrate services by hand. However,
>> upgrade from 6.4 -> 7.x should be doable.
>
> Oh, it depends on how conservative you want to be.  If you must always
> absolutely definitely have a fast back-out path in case of things going
> horribly wrong, then the thing to do is either install a new HDD and set up
> the target version of the OS on that, or split up a RAID1 mirror, update one
> half of the mirror and then resynch in the appropriate direction once your
> testing shows the update to have succeeded or not.
>
> Of course, those are more expensive and time consuming procedures than
> are usually justifiable. For general purpose use, the upgrade procedures
> described in /usr/src/UPDATING, the handbook, Colin Percival's
> daemonology.org blog and RSE's web pages at freebsd.org will basically work.
>
>> Anyway, see this: http://people.freebsd.org/~rse/upgrade/
>>
>> It's some authoritative source for upgrades.
>
> While RSE's account is factual and accurate and well worth the time
> of anyone looking into doing an upgrade, I don't believe it's /the/
> authoritative source.  He says himself: your systems will be different.
> As the perl folk say: TIMTOWTDI.
>        Cheers,
>
>        Matthew

Thank you, Matthew, for the time you've taken to clarify all the issues raised.
I've been living in Windoze world for some good number of days so it
also helps jog my memory/understanding of things in this 'world' of
FreeBSD:-)
Talk of the stray sheep that has just returned to the fold.


-- 
Best regards,
Odhiambo WASHINGTON,
Nairobi,KE
+254733744121/+254722743223
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"Oh My God! They killed init! You Bastards!"
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