Hallo!
I would be thankful if somebody comments on the following sequence to
upgrade OpenBSD system. The main purpose is to make an upgrade with as
little downtime as possible and to have a way to return to the last
known working state. Essentially it involves creating temporary
dual-boot environment
1. Computer works and there is one file system big enough to
accomodate whole new system and is not currently actively used,
say /tmp ie /tmp's place is temporarily on / file system. umount
/tmp and mount under /mnt
2. Untar new file sets using 'suf="42.tgz"; for i in etc base comp
man misc; do tar -C /mnt -xzphf ${i}${suf}; done and /bsd kernel
3. Create devices like cd /mnt/dev and ./MAKEDEV all
4. copy/customize /mnt/etc, 'diff -r /etc /mnt/etc' | less (look out
for fstab, motd, hosts, hostname.if etc)
5. chroot /mnt and add extra software using pkg_add and applying patches
6. reboot the system entering at the console boot> prompt with
something like 'boot hd0d:/bsd -a'
7. when new system works ok, empty old filesystems and copy new
contents from working system, say with 'tar cf - /usr | tar -C
/old-usr-mountpoint -xf -' etc and reboot
If fact i tried this one (except chroot and last step) and it seems to
work all right but maybe there is something to look out for? In my case
i also moved from i386 to amd64 and so i had to boot from cd42.iso to
enter 'boot hd0d:/bsd -a' and obiously need in the end install new boot
loading code into MBR.
Best regards
Imre
PS for some reason i had to press enter twice at the end of swap device line
....
dkcsum: sd0 matches BIOS drive 0x80
root device (default sd0d):
swap device (default sd0b):
root on sd0d swap on sd0b dump on sd0b
