Upgrade strategy for production server

[Doug Barton]

Travis Whitton wrote:
> Hello all,
> After working with Linux on a number of levels for the last 5 years, I've
> decided to try FreeBSD. 

Woo hoo, welcome to the fun!

> I just finished installing 4.9, and I have everything   
> tweaked to fit my needs.  I'm tracking RELENG_4_9, and so far so good with
> everything.

Good news.

> Now on to my question, I just noticed that 5.3 will probably be coming out
> sometime in the near future, which makes me wonder if I've made the wrong
> decision in installing 4.9.  Honestly, there aren't really any features in 5.3
> that I think I'll really need, but I'm concerned about the lifespan of the 4.x
> branch. How long will it be until ports start failing due to using an older
> branch? How long can I feasibly run on the 4.x branch?

Ports shouldn't fail at all for a year or more. You didn't mention what
kind of hardware this is. If it's a single processor system, 4.9 is
probably going to give you the best performance in that one year time
frame. If it's an SMP system, in the next 6 months or so 5.x will be a
significant benefit.

> I wouldn't be so concerned; however, once this server is in place, it will be
> running some very critical services and the thought of backing everything up
> and installing from scratch to migrate to 5.x just represents too much
> unnecessary downtime. It seems that there isn't any clean way to upgrade
> between major versions due to differing filesystems (UFS and UFS2) and leftover
> relics from previous releases causing potential problems. 

No, there isn't, and particularly with the issue of new file systems,
there cannot be. Your best bet is to do the backup and restore, as you
mentioned.

That said, I'd like to suggest an alternative proposal. If this system
is so crucial to your operation, it ought to have some redundancy,
right? :)  Why not do a head to head test with 4.9 and 5.x-current on
the same hardware? That way you solve several problems at the same time.
You'll be able to determine conclusively if 5.x works for you, you'll
have a hot spare system ready to go in case of a hardware failure, and
you won't have any downtime at all during upgrade cycles.

> One last thing, I recently patched a port, dbf2mysql, in order to get it to
> work properly with mysql323-server. What is the proper way to get this patch
> committed to the ports tree? It seems generally useful to anyone using the
> program, and I would rather not have to manually patch everytime I upgrade
> the port.

man send-pr

Good luck,

Doug

-- 

    This .signature sanitized for your protection