FreeBSD 4.x EoL

[Jan Grant]

On Tue, 17 Oct 2006, Michael W. Oliver wrote:

> 1. Be prepared to spend a lot of time in single-user mode, especially
> for the 4->5 step, because there is a LOT for mergemaster to do.  The
> step from 5->6 is not nearly as painful.  I didn't try to do the
> installworld and mergemaster in multiuser, and if you do then have a
> bigger set than I do.

If you're setting up machines that you're going to be upgrading like 
this in the future, I think it's _really_ worthwhile hacking out a 
couple of "root slices" - that is, space for a second / and /usr - to 
facilitate this. You can run mergemaster on a secondary copy of your 
/etc (this, of course, requries that the contents of /etc are relatively 
quiescent for this step) and tidy up by hand. You can perform a dump & 
restore followed by a source upgrade, a fresh source install or a binary 
upgrade ad lib; just reboot (with nextboot) when done.

This also means you can keep the previous OS around for a while in case 
there are problems with the new one.

For setups that aren't amenable to automated deployments this works 
pretty well and gives you a safety-net for upgrades.

Cheers,
jan

-- 
jan grant, ISYS, University of Bristol. http://www.bris.ac.uk/
Tel +44 (0)117 3317661   http://ioctl.org/jan/
We thought time travel was impossible. But that was now and this is then.