From owner-freebsd-questions Wed Mar 5 9:24:56 2003 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id C19F837B401 for ; Wed, 5 Mar 2003 09:24:54 -0800 (PST) Received: from pa-plum1b-166.pit.adelphia.net (pa-plum1b-13.pit.adelphia.net [24.53.161.13]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id B991D43F85 for ; Wed, 5 Mar 2003 09:24:53 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from wmoran@potentialtech.com) Received: from potentialtech.com (working [172.16.0.95]) by pa-plum1b-166.pit.adelphia.net (8.12.7/8.12.7) with ESMTP id h25HOqTb000906; Wed, 5 Mar 2003 12:24:52 -0500 (EST) (envelope-from wmoran@potentialtech.com) Message-ID: <3E6632D0.9000900@potentialtech.com> Date: Wed, 05 Mar 2003 12:24:32 -0500 From: Bill Moran User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; FreeBSD i386; en-US; rv:1.2.1) Gecko/20030301 X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: IAccounts Cc: freebsd Subject: Re: 4.3 -> RELENG_4 References: <20030305113639.S51291-100000@diana.northnetworks.ca> In-Reply-To: <20030305113639.S51291-100000@diana.northnetworks.ca> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG IAccounts wrote: > Unfortunatly, I have never successfully upgraded a Free box yet, mind you > I have only tried it on one. > > Last year I was dropped into a production environment with all 4.3 > machines. I have no devel equipment prior to 4.6. The upgrade attempts > were all only on one box (4.6) and failed due to suspect hardware. > > My question is not howto upgrade, but; > > 1> Since I have only production equipment to 'test' an upgrade on, I am > very nervous. At what point of the upgrade procedure is it too late to > turn back if something does not go right. If you install the kernel, then reboot (before installing world) you will be ensuring that the new kernel you built will boot reliably. This is the final practical point of return. If you have problems with the new kernel booting, you can copy /kernel.old back to /kernel and be back to where you started. If the new kernel is fine, continue with installworld. Once you've installed world, however, it's an ungodly amount of work to revert everything. > 2> I keep amanda tape backups of every file system on all machines. If > something goes critically wrong, can the system be rebooted at least to > the point where I can pull data back off tapes? As long as your system is bootable, yes. Do you have FreeBSD 4.3 CDs? If so, you can easily do a base install, and then restore from backup to get back up and running as you were. (should things happen to go terribly wrong) I've very seldom had any problems upgrading using cvsup. You will hit a few (minor) gotchas ... read /usr/src/UPDATING and you won't have any problems with them. Basically: Update your source with cvsup read /usr/src/UPDATING and follow any instructions required (I believe you'll need to manually create the relatively new sendmail users) Reveiw you kernel config file to see if any options have changed since 4.3 make buildkernel make installkernel reboot >>> if the reboot doesn't go well, boot kernel.old and copy it to /kernel to get back to 4.3 make buildworld make installworld Going from 4.3 -> 4.7 may cause some problems with some ports. The solution is generally to uninstall the port and rebuild it. Update your ports tree first. Schedule yourself a nice chunk of time to do the first machine, then you'll be able to better predict the time required for the rest. -- Bill Moran Potential Technologies http://www.potentialtech.com To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message