From owner-freebsd-questions Wed May 29 16:46:47 2002 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from saratoga.linuxpowered.net (saratoga.linuxpowered.net [63.121.110.48]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id B7E3D37B404 for ; Wed, 29 May 2002 16:46:38 -0700 (PDT) Received: (from mail@localhost) by saratoga.linuxpowered.net (8.12.1/8.12.1/Debian -2) id g4TNkXmZ031661 for questions@freebsd.org; Wed, 29 May 2002 16:46:33 -0700 Received: from saratoga.linuxpowered.net (www-data@localhost [127.0.0.1]) by saratoga.linuxpowered.net (8.12.1/8.12.1/Debian -2) with SMTP id g4TNkUOn031652 for ; Wed, 29 May 2002 16:46:30 -0700 Received: from c2503-ipnat-wa-34.graphon.com ([10.121.110.34]) (SquirrelMail authenticated user aphro) by webmail.linuxpowered.net with HTTP; Wed, 29 May 2002 16:46:30 -0700 (PDT) Message-ID: <64883.10.121.110.34.1022715990.squirrel@webmail.linuxpowered.net> Date: Wed, 29 May 2002 16:46:30 -0700 (PDT) Subject: how to do a binary upgrade on a live system? From: "nate" To: X-Priority: 3 Importance: Normal X-MSMail-Priority: Normal X-Mailer: SquirrelMail (version 1.2.5) MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-Virus-Scanned: by AMaViS perl-11 Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG 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