Question regarding a server with an unsupported old version

andrew clarke mail at ozzmosis.com
Tue Oct 23 03:07:40 UTC 2012


On Mon 2012-10-22 11:31:36 UTC+0900, Rei Okamoto (okamoto at mix-net.co.jp) wrote:

> I want to build the test server as close to the
> actual server as possible, such as considering the
> OS's version 4.11 to be close enough to 4.7, but
> as I try to install PHP4 with a following command,

Like others have said, if at all possible you should at least try to
upgrade to supported versions of FreeBSD & PHP 4.

FreeBSD 7.x should have similar system requirements as 4.7, except for
needing more disk space. Having said that though, support for FreeBSD
7.4 is estimated to end in February 2013, just four months away, and I
can't see any signs on the FreeBSD web site that there is a 7.5
release being planned. So perhaps switching to 8.3 is the more
sensible option if your hardware will allow it.

I should point out that it should be possible to use 'pkg_create -a'
on the existing system to create tarballs of every installed package,
then install FreeBSD 4.7 under VirtualBox, copy the tarballs to the
virtual machine, then install all of them with 'pkg_add *.tgz'.

It may also be possible to use rsync to synchronise the VM's
filesystem with the actual server machine, although I think rsync will
need to be installed on both. Also, sshd will probably need to be
temporarily enabled on the original server if it's not already.

There is also the 'dump' and 'restore' programs in FreeBSD that could
be used for cloning a FreeBSD system over a network, although I'm not
at all familiar with their usage.

Is there any particular reason you went with 4.11? Is it because it
was the last of the 4.x series? (I don't recall offhand.) I vaguely
recall there were some ABI changes over the lifetime of the 4.x series
which meant binaries built for, say, FreeBSD 4.0 would not run under
later versions (4.8 perhaps). I only mention this because you might
encounter problems running binaries built for FreeBSD 4.7 under
FreeBSD 4.11.

Regards
Andrew


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