From owner-freebsd-questions Thu Oct 24 1:25:24 2002 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 365EE37B401 for ; Thu, 24 Oct 2002 01:25:23 -0700 (PDT) Received: from mailc.telia.com (mailc.telia.com [194.22.190.4]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 3798D43E42 for ; Thu, 24 Oct 2002 01:25:22 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from listsub@401.cx) Received: from 401.cx (malin.twenty4help.se [195.67.108.195]) by mailc.telia.com (8.12.5/8.12.5) with ESMTP id g9O8PJXN010153; Thu, 24 Oct 2002 10:25:20 +0200 (CEST) X-Original-Recipient: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Message-ID: <3DB7AE43.7050307@401.cx> Date: Thu, 24 Oct 2002 10:24:35 +0200 From: "Roger 'Rocky' Vetterberg" User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.0.1) Gecko/20020823 Netscape/7.0 X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: "W. D." Cc: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG, Dan Pelleg Subject: Re: Linux vs. FreeBSD References: <5.1.0.14.2.20021023215832.047e51c0@us-webmasters.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit 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 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