Just finished the series of incremental upgrades of my farmhouse "home office" system from 6.8 to 7.4.
Finally am current for the first time in years! And I am amazed and grateful for the all the incredible work the developers and leadership have done. The sysupgrade process got smoother and smother with each incremental release. I had been used to the gotchas in the upgrading process from years ago, even though the sysupgrade method had well become the norm by 6.8. I still was a bit too gun shy to upgrade for some years, since I normally have so little time to really dig into the inner workings of OpenBSD to figure out gotchas at upgrade time. The only scary point was when after one of the upgrades, a "pkg_add -u" overfilled my /usr/local and the process aborted before finishing. So I did a bit of searching and found an article on reddit addressing that problem by deleting the /src and /obj partitions (i and j, I think they were), which follow /usr/local (partition h), and then expanding /usr/local. /src and /obj are not necessary unless one is recompiling the system. Regretted a bit, seeing them go, but all these years, never really had the time to dig as deep into OpenBSD as I would have wished. The article suggested, doing a "df", then doing the arithmetic on the sizes of i and j and adding the freed space to h, using disklabel carefully. Nest step was to be doing a "growfs" on h. But the latter didn't work for me, for reasons I wasn't able to quickly figure out. For many years I only did any kind of backup using tar and ./tgz's, and never had learned to do dump and restore. But it looked like it was time to learn how to use dump and restore now, and then dump /usr/local onto a big additional partition I usually add to my install which I call /backups. Thank goodness for the age of terabyte hard drives. Could have mounted a USB hard drive, and used that instead, but there was room enough in my extra partition, so long as I didn't screw up everything, like the whole partition table on disk! Anyway, so I did that, just deleted /usr/local and rebuilt it with disklabel and the greater size parameter. Then I made it pristine with a newfs. Next step was to "restore" the dump I had made. Wow, that works great. I didn't realize that it would preserve all the links as well. What did I ever do without it! OK, so back to restarting "pkg_add -u" and let 'er rip. Seemed to Work! Continued the incremental sysupgrades. Now I am running 7.4 happily. Did an df and see that /usr/local is filled to 89%. Obviously I should spend some time deleting packages I no longer use. Only thing that disappoints me it that it looks like, from the package update process, that maxima is discontinued. It was the one package I most rely on, for doing math for my studies of quantum computing. I'll dig deeper later. One little glitch from all the process is that somehow I must have lost a file or failed to delete a file that has something to do the default character set files or pointers for xterm under "fvwm". A new xterm starts automatically in a super super small font. Can't even read it. Control-right-mouse on an xterm gives the menu for selecting the font size and also the choice of using Truetype fonts, which works, OK, but I have to do it each time I open a new xterm. I also notice that when I start up xclock, it also comes up with a very tiny font to small to read. I usually call it up with: xclock -d -render -twelve -strftime "%A %d % and put it at the top right hand corner of my big screen. Maybe now I have to to add a parameter for the font size or something. Perhaps something similar for xterm itself. Will have a little extra job to figure what that's all about, and also to perhaps to change some defaults for xterm. Other than that, everything else seems to work perfectly! Now I can do the same in downtown Milk River. Still have what remains of the Computer Shop of Calgary working there, and my mail server is there too. Looks like that might be a bit more touchy with a number changes to the SMPT driver and setup. But I guess I can deal with it. Thanks guys! Austin
