Date: Thu, 19 Oct 2006 12:09:50 -0500 From: "Jim C. Nasby" <decibel@decibel.org> To: Yoshihiro Ota <ota@j.email.ne.jp> Cc: Jan Grant <jan.grant@bristol.ac.uk>, "Michael W. Oliver" <michael@gargantuan.com>, FreeBSD Stable <freebsd-stable@freebsd.org> Subject: Re: FreeBSD 4.x EoL Message-ID: <20061019170950.GP71084@decibel.org> In-Reply-To: <20061018220446.02eae2e1.ota@j.email.ne.jp> References: <453531C9.7080304@freebsd.org> <20061017230722.GH8866@gargantuan.com> <20061018120336.H42237@tribble.ilrt.bris.ac.uk> <20061018220446.02eae2e1.ota@j.email.ne.jp>
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On Wed, Oct 18, 2006 at 10:04:46PM -0500, Yoshihiro Ota wrote: > On Wed, 18 Oct 2006 12:13:11 +0100 (BST) > Jan Grant <jan.grant@bristol.ac.uk> wrote: > > If you're setting up machines that you're going to be upgrading like > > this in the future, I think it's _really_ worthwhile hacking out a > > couple of "root slices" - that is, space for a second / and /usr - to > > facilitate this. You can run mergemaster on a secondary copy of your > > /etc (this, of course, requries that the contents of /etc are relatively > > quiescent for this step) and tidy up by hand. You can perform a dump & > > restore followed by a source upgrade, a fresh source install or a binary > > upgrade ad lib; just reboot (with nextboot) when done. > > > > This also means you can keep the previous OS around for a while in case > > there are problems with the new one. > > > > For setups that aren't amenable to automated deployments this works > > pretty well and gives you a safety-net for upgrades. > > Good advice. I have a few additions. > > In fact, you don't need *a* partitions to boot such as ad0s1a. > You simply need to spare a FreeBSD partition. > > At boot loader, you could type: > > ad(0,2,e) > to boot "e" partition of the "2nd" slice on the first drive which is > denoted by "0." > > ad(2,2,f) > to boot from "f" partition of the 2nd slice on the 3rd drive. > > If you have lots of physical memory and swap space, you may be able > to spare swap space for this porpuse for a moment. In another word, > you can disable swap device for a while and use it as a root parition. The issue I run into is that I use software raid (vinum in 4.11, gmirror in 6.x), and I don't know of any way to go from one to the other that doesn't involve wiping both drives at the same time. -- Jim C. Nasby, Database Architect decibel@decibel.org Give your computer some brain candy! www.distributed.net Team #1828 Windows: "Where do you want to go today?" Linux: "Where do you want to go tomorrow?" FreeBSD: "Are you guys coming, or what?"
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