Date: Thu, 23 Jul 1998 18:52:34 +0100 From: nik@iii.co.uk To: Brad Clawsie <brad@yahoo-inc.com> Cc: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: upgrade problems Message-ID: <19980723185234.55318@iii.co.uk> In-Reply-To: <35B75198.AD0EC9BB@yahoo-inc.com>; from Brad Clawsie on Thu, Jul 23, 1998 at 08:07:04AM -0700 References: <35B75198.AD0EC9BB@yahoo-inc.com>
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
On Thu, Jul 23, 1998 at 08:07:04AM -0700, Brad Clawsie wrote:
> I recently attempted to upgrade from 2.2.6 to 2.2.7, and had a rather
> bad experience. I'm sure it was because of a stupid oversight or gross
> error on my part, but I can't figure out which exactly.
>
> To do the upgrade, I ran /stand/sysinstall as root and went to the
> "upgrade" option on the front page. I assumed that this would do a
> rather painless upgrade for me, as the other tools in the sysinstall
> program work very well for a simple-mindedapproach to maintenance.
>
> Before I even go on, was I completely off my rocker using this utility
> for an OS upgrade?
No. By and large it works well, as long as you have backups around. You
do have backups, right?
As with all automated approaches though, there is room for it to get
confused.
> As it stands, I walked away for a while and when I came back the utility
> told me it had ran out of swap space after it began to "pound on my
> root" or something.
I don't understand that bit. It's possible that either you haven't got
enough swap space available, or that the size of your root ('/')
filesystem is too small.
> I've done a clean install of 2.2.7 since, but I would just like to know
> in future upgrades what is the correct way to go. People at work have
> mentioned the CVSup-way, but frankly I'm a little intimidated by it.
Using CVSup to get the source and then running 'make world' is certainly
a more convoluted way to do it, with more keys to press. It does however
offer you the opportunity to see in more detail what's going on, and
is probably a better documented method than using sysinstall to do the
upgrade.
However, the same caveats apply -- make sure you have a fresh backup of
your system.
> P.S. On another note, all of the documentation I read (online, in my
> 2.2.6 cdrom) indicated quite strongly that an mishandled OS upgrade
> could result in me losing my system. Was this a subtle hint? Is the
> upgrade procedure still not really polished? I haven't seen warnings as
> stern elsewhere.
It's not that it's not polished, it's more to do with the fact that it's
quite hard to do something so disastrous with FreeBSD that it renders
your system unusable.
I mean, as root, it's quite easy to do things like 'rm -rf /' by mistake,
and stuff like that. But at least, if you do that, it's your fault. If
something goes wrong with an automated system it's not really your fault,
and in addition, if you're using the automated approach it's probably
because you don't have the necessary skills to fix the system if something
goes wrong (no offense intended by that remark to any reader, that's just
my experience).
N
--
Work: nik@iii.co.uk | FreeBSD + Perl + Apache
Rest: nik@nothing-going-on.demon.co.uk | Remind me again why we need
Play: nik@freebsd.org | Microsoft?
To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org
with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?19980723185234.55318>