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Date: Wed, 10 May 2006 14:25:35 +0100 (BST)
From: Alex Hayward <xelah-freebsd@xelah.com>
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Cc: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org
Subject: Re: Best practices for remote upgrade?
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On Tue, 9 May 2006, Scott Harrison wrote:

> 	This sounds nice except that I do not have my disk already
> partitioned like this.  Can I take a 4.7 machine (for example) and
> live repartition it to be like this?

It /is/ possible to upgrade from at least some versions of FreeBSD 4 to
some versions of FreeBSD 5 remotely without a spare partition (I've done
it a few times), but there's lots that can go wrong. See
http://unix.derkeiler.com/Mailing-Lists/FreeBSD/stable/2004-01/0033.html

Watch out, though, after the 'tar' step you may find your binaries don't
work (including binaries like 'reboot'). Keeping a copy is a good idea.