Best practices for remote upgrade?

[Hans Lambermont]

David Wolfskill wrote:

> On Mon, May 08, 2006 at 02:29:23PM +0200, Scott Harrison wrote:
>> 	I have some 4.x servers that I would like to upgrade to 5.x, and  
>> perhaps 6.x.  However, I do not have any local access to these  
>> machines.  I can ssh into them only.  I would like to know whether it  
>> is possible for me to upgrade the machines with only ssh access, and  
>> what one should do to go about upgrading them.
...
> I then have little shell scripts to use "dump | restore" to "clone" the
> file systems from one slice to the other.
...
> * Reboot from the "other" slice (the target of the above operation).
> * Upgrade in place.
> * Reboot (without changing active slice).

I do almost the same; I do not reboot to the other slice to upgrade it,
instead I use the current slice to upgrade, and if that fails reboot to
the other slice (the backup slice). It's the same idea, with one less
reboot.

This dual-boot-slice (or disk :) setup also allows for the UFS->UFS2
transition.

regards,
   Hans Lambermont