upgrading a dozen of servers from 7.0 to 8.1

[Radomskiy Yuriy]

Hello.

Thank you and everyone who answered.

I will share my experinece to the list when I walk my way throught the upgrade )

21.01.2011, 17:13, "Odhiambo Washington" <odhiambo at gmail.com>:
> On Fri, Jan 21, 2011 at 4:54 PM, Radomskiy Yuriy <yurius.r at yandex.ua>; wrote:
>
>>  Hello!
>>
>>  I have around 15 servers running FreeBSD 7.0 across the country.
>>  I would like to upgrade them to 7.3 or even 8.1 using binary updates.
>>  They are primary mail servers all running apache-2.0 + php5-5.2.10,
>>  mysql-server-5.1, exim-4.69, dovecot-1.1
>>  They are almost identical - they were identical a couple of years ago, but
>>  now they have some minor differences (soft, settings, scripts)
>>  Hardware is all the same.
>>  All the servers are in production.
>>
>>  The steps I have to do and the questions about them i have:
>>  1. update all soft to current versions (including change of config files)
>>  apache - goto v2.2
>>  php - goto v5.3
>>  mysql - stick with 5.1
>>  exim - goto 4.73
>>  dovecot - goto 1.2.16
>>  q's:
>>  how can upgrading to apache 2.2 + php5.3 be done with minimal downtime?
>
> portupgrade -o lang/php52 lang/php5
>
> That will upgrade your php from 5.2.10 to 5.2.17. Please stick with
> php-5.2.x unless you are sure php-5.3 will not break some web apps you are
> running.
>
> upgrade php-extensions the same way.
>
> can i upgrade or is it better to rebuild it from the scratch (because of
>
>>  major version changes)?
>
> You can upgrade. Please follow the instructions from
> http://people.freebsd.org/~rse/upgrade/freebsd-upgrade-7x-8x.txt<http://people.freebsd.org/%7Erse/upgrade/freebsd-upgrade-7x-8x.txt>
>
> Just note one thing I noticed while upgrading my servers:
>
> s/compat7x-`uname -m`-7.2.702000.200906.1.tbz/compat7x-`uname
> -m`-7.3.703000.201008.tbz/g
>
>>  2. do a binary upgrade of OS according to handbook
>>  http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/updating-upgrading-freebsdupdate.html
>
> You can do that, but I personally prefer
> http://people.freebsd.org/~rse/upgrade/freebsd-upgrade-7x-8x.txt<http://people.freebsd.org/%7Erse/upgrade/freebsd-upgrade-7x-8x.txt>.
> I have never used freebsd-update on any system I run, but that is out of
> choice, not any other reason!
>
>>  3. rebuil all the software again
>>  portupgrade -af
>
> If you follow
> http://people.freebsd.org/~rse/upgrade/freebsd-upgrade-7x-8x.txt<http://people.freebsd.org/%7Erse/upgrade/freebsd-upgrade-7x-8x.txt>,
> there will not be any urgency in doing portupgrade -af.
..