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
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