From owner-freebsd-questions Mon Jul 22 10: 1:24 2002 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 BB42E37B400 for ; Mon, 22 Jul 2002 10:01:21 -0700 (PDT) Received: from dire.bris.ac.uk (dire.bris.ac.uk [137.222.10.60]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id C9A8843E65 for ; Mon, 22 Jul 2002 10:01:20 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from Jan.Grant@bristol.ac.uk) Received: from mail.ilrt.bris.ac.uk by dire.bris.ac.uk with SMTP-PRIV with ESMTP; Mon, 22 Jul 2002 18:01:04 +0100 Received: from cmjg (helo=localhost) by mail.ilrt.bris.ac.uk with local-esmtp (Exim 3.16 #1) id 17WgXc-0001xs-00; Mon, 22 Jul 2002 18:00:12 +0100 Date: Mon, 22 Jul 2002 18:00:12 +0100 (BST) From: Jan Grant X-X-Sender: cmjg@mail.ilrt.bris.ac.uk To: David Wilk Cc: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: FreeBSD upgrade maintenance vs. debian (please help) In-Reply-To: <20020722094844.D9023@cygnus.wks.Gallup.cia-g.com> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII 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 On Mon, 22 Jul 2002, David Wilk wrote: > I'm currently lusting after the superior performance (in so many respects) > of the FreeBSD kernel (and I prefer the BSD style init) but am apprehensive > about the update/upgrade process. > > so, FreeBSD advocates and experienced sysadmins, convince me to go FreeBSD, > Please! For a really speedy update, use two system drives; one that / and /usr, etc. are live on, and one that are a spitting image. install kernel and world + mergemaster, etc to the "off-line" copy and reboot into that. Then switch your notion of "live" and "sidelined" if the reboot is successful: sync the sidelined copy up to the new version. This works better with a read-mostly / and /usr: ie, if you've got your manpages caching elsewhere, log files and other stuff somewhere else, and if you can minimise the changes to / (master.password is the obvious bit that gets written regularly). -- jan grant, ILRT, University of Bristol. http://www.ilrt.bris.ac.uk/ Tel +44(0)117 9287088 Fax +44 (0)117 9287112 RFC822 jan.grant@bris.ac.uk "No generalised law is without exception." A self-demonstrating axiom. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message