Upgrade from 8.4 to 10.2

[Gregory Orange]

On 27/12/15 22:33, Odhiambo Washington wrote:
> On 14 December 2015 at 06:24, Gregory Orange <gregory.orange at calorieking.com
>> wrote:
>> On 12/12/15 19:50, Peter Harrison via freebsd-questions wrote:
>>> I have a server I want to upgrade from 8.4-R to 10.2 using a binary
>>> upgrade.
>>> What's the preferred way of doing that? Ie. Should I jump to 9 first? And
>>> can I safely do it remotely or do I need to be on front of the console?
>>>
>> FWIW I successfully upgraded over a dozen FreeBSD 8.4 amd64 machines
>> straight to 10.1 earlier this year, bypassing 9.x all together. One of the
>> machines had bad enough problems to require a reinstall, but it was very
>> old hardware and I didn't have physical access to it so I never got to the
>> root cause. In the end we chucked it and got a new machine anyway.
>>
> What procedure did you use?

I used the binary upgrade procedure[1] (since I mostly use -RELEASE 
versions of FreeBSD), something like this:

# freebsd-update -r 10.1-RELEASE upgrade
# freebsd-update install
# reboot
# freebsd-update install
# pkg_list=$(pkg info -aoq)
# pkg delete -a
# pkg install $pkg_list
# freebsd-update install

HTH,
Greg.

[1] 
https://www.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/updating-upgrading-freebsdupdate.html 
"23.2.3. Performing Major and Minor Version Upgrades"

PS: Sorry for the slow response - I'm just back from summer holidays.

PPS: In reality I like to maintain a separate list of installed 
top-level packages for $pkg_list so that the dependencies are installed 
automatically and marked as automatic when I look at:
# pkg query "%a %n"