Hardware migration and upgrade from 6.3 to 8.0 advice

[Achilleas Mantzios]

Thanx to all.
I will keep the old machine for development/maintenance/support, while
bulding/testing/migrating the newest versions of software in the new hardware.

Up to now, i got the base system/kernel working ok on the new beast, and currently installing additional distributions. All seem fine.

Achilleas Mantzios

--- On Fri, 12/4/09, Adam Vande More <amvandemore at gmail.com> wrote:

From: Adam Vande More <amvandemore at gmail.com>
Subject: Re: Hardware migration and upgrade from 6.3 to 8.0 advice
To: "Achilleas Mantzios" <mantzios.achill at yahoo.com>
Cc: freebsd-questions at freebsd.org
Date: Friday, December 4, 2009, 1:36 PM

On Fri, Dec 4, 2009 at 2:57 AM, Achilleas Mantzios <mantzios.achill at yahoo.com> wrote:





                        Hello,



i am facing this situation, where i need to upgrade from my 6.3 i386

system, used as my main workstation, to a new hardware based on amd64

(phenom II x4).







My current system is alive since 2005, so is full of code, scripts,

configurations,look&feel,ssh keys etc.. that i would like to keep

handy in my new system.



Also, currently i run gmirror, i am mentioning it, in case it affects something.







Since 2005, dealing with programming/support/etc.. i haven't done any

upgrade task in FreeBSD, so i dont feel that confident in this regard.







I could:



a) install a brand new 8.0-RELEASE in the new hardware and then



 a1) just mount the old disks to the new system or



 a2) migrate /home user data directly to the new home dirs



b) migrate all current data to the new hardware, kernel/system

included, and then try to upgrade to 8.0 (by sysinstall or

makeworld/makekernel)







So, its a trade-off between pain, correctness, effectiveness, and ease of use.







What would you guys recommend? Which way to go? Any other options?



Thanx in advance!



Please include me in your CC, as i am not subscribed to the list.



Achilleas Mantzios




You may want to consider installing from scratch and migrating over.  This would allow you setup zfs and make the move easier.  Also may want to explore run ahci(4) as that can seriously increase disk speed although I believe many more improvements live in STABLE, not RELEASE.


-- 
Adam Vande More