any problem going from 9.x (don't laugh) to 11 directly?

[Doug Hardie]

> On 14 February 2018, at 14:11, Randal L. Schwartz <merlyn at stonehenge.com> wrote:
> 
> 
> Never got a chance to move to 10 in time.  Should I just skip 10 and go
> to 11?  What will that break?  And keep in mind I'm ZFS-on-Root,
> although I haven't upgraded my bootloader or ZFS version yet.

I don't use zfs, but I have made that update on a number of systems.  There can be issues depending on the specific 9.x and if you use freebsd-update or build from source.  FreeBSD 9.1 cannot use freebsd-update to go directly to 11.x.  There are patches required to freebsd-update to be able to make that work.  The patch should be in the archive.  I no longer have any 9.x systems and don't recall if I still have it.  If you going that way, let me know and I will search for it.

During the upgrade process when you first reboot, you really need to boot in single user mode.  I have always done a regular boot as the machines were not local and had no access to the console.  There are enough library changes that most services just will not start properly and tend to hang.  You are left with a system that is non-responsive.  The one approach I used successfully one time was to comment virtually everything other than sshd out in rc.conf.  You have to make sure you have really killed sendmail though.  Setting it to NO is not enough.  Otherwise it will eventually give up and give you back service, but it takes a long time.

-- Doug