Ancient FreeBSD update path

[Bakul Shah]

On Fri, 19 Jan 2018 13:28:41 +0100 Andrea Brancatelli <abrancatelli at schema31.it> wrote:
Andrea Brancatelli writes:
> Hello guys. 
> 
> I have a couple of ancient FreeBSD install that I have to bring into
> this century (read either 10.4 or 11.1) :-) 
> 
> I'm talking about a FreeBSD 8.0-RELEASE-p4 and a couple of FreeBSD
> 9.3-RELEASE-p53. 
> 
> What upgrade strategy would you suggest? 
> 
> Direct jump into the future (8 -> 11)? Progressive steps (8 -> 9 -> 10
> -> 11)? Boiling water on the HDs? :-) 
> 
> Thanks, any suggestion in more than welcome.

Incremental update will take a long time and if something gets
messed up in the middle, you will be much worse off. You may
also not find relevant packages any more for an EOLed release.
And you may have to solve problems that no longer exist on
newer packages.

What I would do is to make a backup of everything, make a list
of installed packages and config files, and do a fresh install
of the latest release. Then get the critical packages working.
Then add others as needed.

If possible do this on a separate machine so that you can
check config/program behavior on the original machine.  When
you are satisfied, either switch to the other machine or copy
things back to the original. When one of my computers was
starting to fall apart, I did this with an inexpensive used
thinkpad.

One more thing to consider: your ancient machine hardware may
need to be maintenance/repais/replacement.  A fully
operational second (temporary) machine gives you a chance to
try to do maintenace such as remove dust and cat hair
carefully, check fans and replace them if needed, replace
disks if older than 4 years, etc.