Upgrading from FreeBSD 4.10 to 8.1?

Devin Teske dteske at vicor.com
Thu Jan 6 21:50:11 UTC 2011


Sharing some of our experiences here at VICOR.

On Thu, 2011-01-06 at 15:55 -0500, grarpamp wrote:
> I know I'll take heat from everyone else who responded saying to
> effectively ship a new box. But maybe this user has significant
> costs involved with that. Along with any other reasons...

Our company is in that situation. In fact, we have:

>1000 systems still running FreeBSD-4.11
>200 systems still running FreeBSD-4.8
>1 system still running FreeBSD-4.4
and 1 system still running FreeBSD-2.2.2

The >200 4.8 systems are actually in the process of upgrading to 4.11
this year (go ahead... roflmao your heart out).

Later this year, we plan to migrate ~500 systems from 4.11 to 8.1 and we
plan to do it with a binary upgrade package (of our own design).


> 
> v4 to v8 can be done. I've done it entirely live over the net.
> Nothing crazy about it.

Confirmed. We've done it too. Nothing special.


> 
> The basic idea is that there are too many changes and tools involved
> to fart around with build/install world, mergemaster, CD's, sysinstall,
> etc. And they're just not aware of such a jump. And you can't trust
> the idiots on the other end to get it right even if they would work.
> You are the SA, free your mind. To the initiate, it would be
> harrowing. To the seasoned SA, it's logical cake.
> 

It takes time to be thorough, but if you're thorough there's no reason
to fear a binary upgrade. In fact, you can logistically break it down
into the following procedure:

- Take vanilla 4.x host-one
- Take vanilla 8.x host-two
- Diff host-one to host-two
- Build binary differential package
- Package pre-install regresses the machine by uninstalling all packages
- Package post-install builds the 8.x box back up with new packages


> So backup your entire 4.x box over the wire, there will be no return.
> 

In our 4.x->8.x binary upgrade, we have a back-out strategy because
we've been doing binary upgrades for years.

In essence, our company started on FreeBSD-2.2.2, then did binary
upgrade to 4.4. Then binary upgrade to 4.8. Then binary upgrade to 4.11.
Now binary upgrade to 8.1.

The backout strategy is essentially to re-install the "4.11 upgrade"
package (downgrading from 8.1 back to 4.11).

But really... in over 10 years, we've never had to "back out" a binary
upgrade (the procedure to do so has been documented and there, but in
the tens-of-thousands of binary upgrades we've done, we've never had to
back it out... not even once).


> Go find a box and install v8 however you want it. If you fail, this
> one goes to the shipper asap. You can use a vm but that will take
> longer to ship. You are very wise to also install a v4 box and
> overlay your backup on it first for testing the entire process. If
> you failed to heed SA wisdom about separating / /usr /usr/local
> /var /home /boot, free space, etc on the original v4 box, your life
> will be much harder. But if you have a ton of unpartitioned free
> space on it, you can fix that one at a time too ;)
> 
> Be very aware of boot sectors, loaders, partitions, slices, fstab,
> sizes, /dev, ifconfig, packet filters, kernel config, etc. That
> kills most people. Also, since all your apps will be pristine v8
> vers, you need to sort out their use of the old data and config.
> 
> If you have space, rsync -Haxi upload your v8 mountpoints to separate
> staging dirs on the v4 box. It helps narrow your power fail window :)
> 
> Get on the v4 box. If you've got console, re boot -s. If not, take
> it down till only init, sh and sshd remain. If you have space, rsync
> your current v4 mountpoints to some backup dirs.
> 
> You're going to need static versions of rsync, openssh, sh, su, and
> any other tools. You'll need to kill and run the static sshd... re:
> fstat, umount, libs, etc. If you want, truncate /etc/rc to load
> only static sshd from /root. This gives you some chance at recovery.
> Again, do a local trial run to figure out what, where and when you
> want or need all the tricks and in what order.
> 
> Mount everything read-write and rsync -Haxi --delete from your v8
> staging dirs (whether local or remote) over top of the live but now
> library freed v4 mountpoints.
> 
> Reboot ;)
> 
> Don't forget to lay down new boot sectors etc as and when needed
> during or after the above.
> 
> It works, don't complain to me or this list if you break it :)
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-- 
Cheers,
Devin Teske

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