Recommended Way To Update Old Systems To Current Versions

[Thomas Mueller]

from Drew Tomlinson:

> I’m running two boxes with FreeBSD and both have been neglected for years.  One is running 9.1-RELEASE-p1 and the other is running 10.0-RELEASE.  I like to upgrade both to the current version of 11 and upgrade all the ports as
> well.  I’ve used FreeBSD since version 4.x and am used to downloading source, running make kernel and make world,  and then running portupgrade to force upgrades of all installed ports.  However it appears I am so out of date
> that I can’t follow that process anymore.  Something to do with a change in 20170117 that won’t allow unsupported systems to build ports?
        
> So what is the recommended way to upgrade?  Binary first?  Then I’d have a current system upon which to build?  Is there a guide to which you can point me?

> Any help appreciated as I’d rather not screw this up. ;)
         
I just managed to upgrade from source a FreeBSD 10.1-STABLE installation to 11.0-STABLE, using a FreeBSD 11.0-current from August 2015 to do the compiling.

Next, I want to update to 12.0-current on another partition.

You could possibly upgrade 10.0 by source to 11.0-STABLE or RELEASE, or you might need to do this by steps.

I have a big hard drive, 3 TB, using GPT, so have space to spare for partitions, save the old installation until I get the new built up.

I don't know about your hard drive configuration and space, but diskspace needs have escalated with recent versions of FreeBSD, as have compiling times.

You could try to rebuild all ports using portupgrade, portmaster or synth, or you could make a list of installed ports, delete all, and rebuild from the beginning.

I haven't used freebsd-update recently so don't know how that would work, though you could try if you don't want to rebuild from source.

Tom