Date: Thu, 24 Oct 2002 10:24:35 +0200 From: "Roger 'Rocky' Vetterberg" <listsub@401.cx> To: "W. D." <WD@US-Webmasters.com> Cc: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG, Dan Pelleg <daniel+fbsdq@pelleg.org> Subject: Re: Linux vs. FreeBSD Message-ID: <3DB7AE43.7050307@401.cx> References: <5.1.0.14.2.20021023215832.047e51c0@us-webmasters.com>
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W. D. wrote: > At 20:39 10/23/2002, Dan Pelleg, wrote: > >>FreeBSD systems are easy to maintain. You can do a source upgrade, >>or a binary upgrade, and the system will go through it and boot >>to the new version without a hitch. On one system I have I've gone from >>FreeBSD 4.1 to 4.7, including every release in between, without ever >>touching the console. When a major version comes out, I typically >>upgrade 10 systems in multiple locations, all within half a day >>without leaving my office.> > > Pray tell, how do you do this? > > Start Here to Find It Fast!© -> http://www.US-Webmasters.com/best-start-page/ > I can confirm that this is in fact possible, and not even difficult to accomplish. My home machine has gone from FreeBSD 2.2.8 to 4.7 without reinstall, and I disconnected the monitor and keyboard somewhere around 3.3. An upgrade consists of the following commands: 'cvsup -g -L2 stable-supfile && cd /usr/src/ && make buildworld && make buildkernel KERNCONF=whatever && make installkernel KERNCONF=whatever && make installworld && reboot' Theoretically you could just paste those lines into a shellscript, make a crontab entry and be done, but I do recommend that you add some error checking and maybe some interaction with the user. Of course, this should _not_ be used on production or otherwise heavy loaded machines. Doing install in single user is recomended, but a box with very low loads will probably do it just fine running multi user. Ive used this method for years (allthough not added to cron but started manually when I think it's needed) and it has only failed me once. When going from 4.6 to 4.7 I had to do a reboot between installkernel and installworld, or the system would fail with a lot of weird memory errors. Luckily, I always update my testmachine first, so when the time came to update the "real" machine I was aware of this and avoided the problem. -- R To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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