From owner-freebsd-questions Wed Nov 22 18:36:56 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from guru.mired.org (okc-65-26-235-186.mmcable.com [65.26.235.186]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with SMTP id 1BA2937B4CF for ; Wed, 22 Nov 2000 18:36:53 -0800 (PST) Received: (qmail 78020 invoked by uid 100); 23 Nov 2000 02:36:52 -0000 From: Mike Meyer MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Message-ID: <14876.33476.106713.227147@guru.mired.org> Date: Wed, 22 Nov 2000 20:36:52 -0600 (CST) To: thursday@altavista.net Cc: questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: best upgrade path? In-Reply-To: <60284412@toto.iv> X-Mailer: VM 6.75 under 21.1 (patch 10) "Capitol Reef" XEmacs Lucid X-face: "5Mnwy%?j>IIV\)A=):rjWL~NB2aH[}Yq8Z=u~vJ`"(,&SiLvbbz2W`;h9L,Yg`+vb1>RG% *h+%X^n0EZd>TM8_IB;a8F?(Fb"lw'IgCoyM.[Lg#r\ Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG thursday@altavista.net types: > Hi, > > I have a FreeBSD 3.3-RELEASE machine which I'm considering upgrading to 4.2-RELEASE. > > I'm wondering what the best upgrade path is: whether to use the "Upgrade" method provided in /stand/sysinstall, or whether to wipe out the hard drive and do a completely fresh install from scratch. Wipe the hard drive (or at least everything fs that install is going to touch) and do a fresh install. The upgrade stuff is relatively painless, but it doesn't safe very much time. > I think I'd like to do whatever would result in the least downtime for the machine (it does virtual hosting for a bunch of my friends' domains) and the least time for me reconfiguring services such as httpd, sendmail samba, natd and my firewall. Hopefully, you know what you changed, and can put it back. Ideally, you've got it all in CVS or something similar (Perforce, anyone?) as well. The only real gotcha will be that sendmail's config files have moved. Maybe it's time to consider postfix or qmail? > My concern about using sysinstall's upgrade utility is that I might run into trouble upgrading exisitng installed packages. Is there an automated tool for upgrading installed ports/packages? "pkg_version -c" provides a script that ties to rebuild everything that's not out of date. However, you want to rebuild everything. You'll need to do that whether you install or upgrade, though.