Rebuilding World Problems

[Gavin Spomer]

Please forgive me if this is not the appropriate list to post this on. If this is a topic for another, more appropriate FreeBSD list, then would someone please kindly point this guy in the right direction? :)

I'm on the security advisory list too and got 2 emails about patches about a month ago. They came with instructions to follow for patching... excellent! Then, the last step has a link to the FreeBSD Handbook's Rebuilding world. Yes, I admit, it's taken me almost a month to get the courage (and find the time) to do this. I'm usually pretty fearless when exploring computer things. I don't really have the best way to backup either. I finally just made tarballs of important directories and scp'd them to one of my Linux machines. I finally got to the point where I booted to single user mode (first time for me) and that's where my problems began. It might be useful to note on the instructions page that you don't have to type "boot -s" to go into single user mode; it's easier to to just select option #4.

First, let me note that step one in rebuilding world should be "cd /usr/src", not "make buildworld". I guess I was supposed to know that for some reason. Having said that, I figured I would also have to be in /usr/src for the "make installworld" step. But I couldn't do that! Why? I could cd to /usr, but not /usr/src!

So, I decided to go ahead and try the "mergemaster -p" step. I was given an error that was something like "cannot find mergemaster". So I thought that maybe in single user mode my $PATH isn't set, so I thought about entering "/sbin/mergemaster -p", but I didn't know if that was the path or not and I chickened out. :( Maybe the fact that I hit Return to choose /bin/sh while going into single user mode instead of my preferred bash had something to do with it?

Here's a slightly dumb question: when I get this all figured out, do I have to start all over from "make buildworld" or can I just continue with booting in single user mode and "mergemaster -p"? I'm guessing I can just continue, but I thought it was important to ask.

Here's a little more intelligent question or two. ;) Is there a way to do this while logged in via ssh? I don't mind making the trip to our computer room so I can select #4 at the FreeBSD prompt, but it's not all that convenient. Also, how long (in general) do the steps "mergemaster -p" through the final reboot take? I am running FreeBSD on a test server, but if I were to use it for my production servers (which I am considering), the down-time of being in single user mode would be a concern.

Thanks to everyone who takes the time to read this. :)

- Gavin