General consensus about upgrading from 5.x to 6.x?

[Zimmerman, Eric]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-freebsd-stable at freebsd.org [mailto:owner-freebsd-
> stable at freebsd.org] On Behalf Of Thomas T. Veldhouse
> Sent: Thursday, October 20, 2005 08:00
> To: freebsd-stable at freebsd.org
> Subject: General consensus about upgrading from 5.x to 6.x?
> 
> I run a very small home office network and domain off of my DSL.
> Currently, I have a FreeBSD 5.4p8 firewall (pf) running.  I am really
> not having any issues, but sometimes the machines gets a bit stodgy
for
> no solid reason [load shouldn't be that high].  I have considered the
> jump to 6.0, but I have held back because of the .0 stigma surrounding
> FreeBSD releases.  What do people think in this case?  I have heard
that
> 6.0 is considered much more stable than later 5.x releases; is this
true
> [in context of my usage patterns]?

I just upgraded from 5.4 release to 6.0RC1 on my home network (running
Postfix+Amavisd, Apache, etc) and it wasn't too painful.  So far 6.0 has
been great (I have it on a Dell 1850 server as well). My only issue with
the 5.4 upgrade was some wrestling with OpenSSL (had a port installed in
5.4 that 6 didn't seem to like) and dealing with some stuff that was
previously in ports, but is now built in (like portsnap). Once those
nuances were resolved, things worked as expected. I got all my ports
rebuilt via portmanager just to be safe. This was my first upgrade
across major versions and overall it was not too bad.

Based on things I have read here, the 6.0 release cannot be compared to
the 5.0 release in terms of stability, etc. and so far that's held true.

Back up your box and give it a whirl, I think you will like it! =)

Eric