Date: Thu, 5 Oct 2000 13:20:39 +0200 From: "James A Wilde" <james.wilde@tbv.se> To: "Send to newbies" <freebsd-newbies@freebsd.org> Subject: Upgrade story Message-ID: <NEBBLHNJHLFCJGCBFDKIKEKACAAA.james.wilde@tbv.se>
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I upgraded from 2.2.8 to 4.1 today and thought I might share with some of you other newbies the adventures I went through. If you will bear with me, a bit of background might be useful or even entertaining. I first came into contact with FreeBSD a little over three years ago when the company where I work started an Internet presence and hired a consultant to set up the Internet Service lan. This he protected with a firewall running 2.2.8 and I was left to administer this beast - under his supervision. I quickly bought the Red Book - I have now also bought the Complete FBSD book also - but most of my experience was gained by the hands-on method. At a later date when we had expanded the IS lan, I needed an smtp server and got someone from the consultant's company to set up a FreeBSD server, 3.1 this time. Then I became daring and set up a machine at home, to play with, using an old pensioned 486 from work. And finally, when the smtp server became unstable - named crashes irregularly - I set up a new one myself, with the latest version of named and sendmail and a few other touches. Recompiled the kernel to incorporate IPFW and eliminate some unnecessary stuff. Soon I'm moving to a new employer who uses Sun Solaris and NT on the inside and Sun Solaris on the outside. I told them I was good (!) at FreeBSD but not so hot at Solaris and, guess what, they told me my first project will be to set up a FreeBSD name server. Which is why I decided it was time to upgrade the original and now pensioned 2.2.8 machine to 4.1 so as to be ready for IPv6 and other good things. Since I'm doing this on the cheapo, I decided to upgrade with FTP. This meant downloading kernel and mfs root file images and creating two boot diskettes. This went _very_ badly. I couldn't get the kernel disk to run. I had downloaded using Internet Explorer to my Windows NT machine and then created the disks from the disk images with rawrite for windows taken from a Linux distribution. A study of the mailing list archives suggested first that I should have used fdimage.exe so I tried that. Another look at the archives led me to download with NT's ftp instead of Internet Explorer. Finally I ftp'd the files to the old 2.2.8 machine and used dd. Still no luck. Back to the archives which were nearly unanimous in stating that the quality of diskettes can be the most significant factor So I tested the formatting of the floppies on the 2.2.8 machine - I haven't used the diskette drive more than a couple of times in three years - and yes, the format process indicated a deplorable quality on my diskettes, even ones which I had successfully used for such things as NT repair disks. Finally I tested one of the boot disks in another machine. It worked perfectly. Back to the 2.2.8 machine. No go. The diskette drive was clearly not up to scratch. I replaced it and at last I could start the installation procedure. The next thing to go wrong was in the information the installation program had collected from the 2.2.8 machine. Its suggestion for a host name was good - taken from rc.conf. Its domain name was good and the suggested IP address. So I didn't think anything of the fact that it had taken the first address in resolv.conf for the name server: 127.0.0.1. As a consequence it couldn't resolve the name of the chosen ftp server. Back to square one. Second time round everything went fine. The system loaded all the new executables, documents and manual pages - at least, it said it did: I haven't had time to check that yet! Time to reboot into the new system. Panic - not the kernel's, mine. I couldn't log in as root nor as myself. I tried the new root password, changed a few weeks ago; I tried the old root password. I tried - since this could be classed as a new installation - an empty password. I restarted the installation process and went in to sysinstall and tried to set the root password there, and create or modify an ordinary user. Neither worked. Back to the mailing list archives where I found the suggestion that I start in single user mode when I could change the root password. This i did - changed it 'back' to its new value, rebooted, logged on as root and changed my personal password 'back' to what it was and, hooray, I've got a functioning machine. The only thing I don't yet know is how typical it is of the proper 4.1 structure. There was, for example, a significant change in the startup files somewhere between 2.2.8 and 3.1. In 2.2.8 you had one rc.conf in /etc and you did all your alterations in that. In 3.1 there is a directory /etc/default which contains a standard rc.conf. In /etc you create a new rc.conf in which you just change the parameters you need to change, and insert such network things as IP address, default router, subnet mask and so forth. But this sort of thing I'll have to take a look at tomorrow. For now I've discovered that something has gone wrong with the configuration of ssh2 on the new machine, and I can't get in from home to take a look. :( Probably the most significant thing I've learnt from today's exercise, apart from the fact that, if one takes it slowly and logically, even a greenhorn can get there in the end, is that, whatever happens to you, it has probably happened to someone else before, and been solved, and that means that it's in there, hiding away in the mailing list archives and it is just a question of framing the right query parameters to dig it out and get the answer you are looking for. And that's a lot better for all users of the mailing list than firing a question off to the list asking the same thing that has been asked a dozen times already. If you've stayed with me this far, well done. I didn't intend it to be so long when I started, but I thought there might be some tips in there for others who may be contemplating the same type of upgrade, even if it isn't as big as the one from 2.2.8 to 4.1. mvh/regards James To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-newbies" in the body of the message
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