Date: Wed, 29 May 2002 16:46:30 -0700 (PDT) From: "nate" <freebsd@aphroland.org> To: <questions@freebsd.org> Subject: how to do a binary upgrade on a live system? Message-ID: <64883.10.121.110.34.1022715990.squirrel@webmail.linuxpowered.net>
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i have been using freebsd for a couple years(off and on) one thing i have never done much of is upgrading. from what i have seen sofar, there doesn't seem to be an elegant way to perform a binary upgrade on a freebsd system. most of my background is debian, and it is normal for me to upgrade a running system to the next minor, or even major release without any need for shutdown/reboot or anything. e.g I upgraded my debian 2.2 workstation to 3.0 last august, and still have not rebooted, uptime of 376 days sofar. I do periodic upgrades every couple of months, usually 100-200 packages get upgraded each time. with about 800 packages getting upgraded during the major number change 2.2->3.0 the freebsd install docs say to use the sysinstall with the version of freebsd that i am upgrading to. I am upgrading to 4.5 from 4.4(clean install). I am doing this just to see what the upgrade process goes like. I would like to avoid a source upgrade, I still have a real bad taste in my mouth when I tried to do a source upgrade on openbsd 2.8 last year. however, I cannot find a sysinstall binary on the freebsd 4.5 install cd. i mounted it, and did a find . -name sysinstall and it came back with nothing. please don't tell me i have to boot from something to upgrade!! a major showstopper for openbsd for me was the fact that to do a binary upgrade I had to boot from the cdrom/floppy(from what i read/understood at the time of 2.8 anyways). which is very very difficult for remote machines. I am running this test mainly to decide whether or not to upgrade my existing freebsd server(only have 1 sofar). so if i trash this system in the process it doesn't matter. nothing is on it. reasons i don't want to a source install: - takes a long time - the system installs a lot of development packages to do the compile work(packages i don't need on a production system) - at least on openbsd 2.8, when I tried to upgrade, it tried to install stuff that I did not have installed, such as kerberos, I am not sure if freebsd's upgrade is similar or not - compile may fail. again, with the openbsd 2.8 upgrade I got memory errors when trying to compile, maybe its a bad ram chip, but the system ran fine for 6+ months(and ever since running on debian) leaving a half upgraded/broken system. this test system, is almost identical to the system that ran openbsd last year, though it has 1/2 the amount of RAM. - I am not interested in doing any special tuning for the system, the defaults are fine - I am not a developer so i cannot audit the source at all(though I have been compiling apps for a long time ..) thanks! nate (hoping for good news) To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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