FreeBSD 4.x EoL

[Yoshihiro Ota]

On Wed, 18 Oct 2006 12:13:11 +0100 (BST)
Jan Grant <jan.grant at bristol.ac.uk> wrote:

> 
> 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.

Good advice.  I have a few additions.

In fact, you don't need *a* partitions to boot such as ad0s1a.
You simply need to spare a FreeBSD partition.

At boot loader, you could type:

ad(0,2,e)
to boot "e" partition of the "2nd" slice on the first drive which is
denoted by "0."

ad(2,2,f)
to boot from "f" partition of the 2nd slice on the 3rd drive.

If you have lots of physical memory and swap space, you may be able
to spare swap space for this porpuse for a moment.  In another word,
you can disable swap device for a while and use it as a root parition.

Regards,
Hiro