Best practices for remote upgrade?

[Alex Hayward]

On Tue, 9 May 2006, Scott Harrison wrote:

> 	This sounds nice except that I do not have my disk already
> partitioned like this.  Can I take a 4.7 machine (for example) and
> live repartition it to be like this?

It /is/ possible to upgrade from at least some versions of FreeBSD 4 to
some versions of FreeBSD 5 remotely without a spare partition (I've done
it a few times), but there's lots that can go wrong. See
http://unix.derkeiler.com/Mailing-Lists/FreeBSD/stable/2004-01/0033.html

Watch out, though, after the 'tar' step you may find your binaries don't
work (including binaries like 'reboot'). Keeping a copy is a good idea.