From owner-freebsd-questions Sat Oct 5 1:13:40 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 8310137B401 for ; Sat, 5 Oct 2002 01:13:37 -0700 (PDT) Received: from lurza.secnetix.de (lurza.secnetix.de [212.66.1.130]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id C06B643E6A for ; Sat, 5 Oct 2002 01:13:36 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from olli@lurza.secnetix.de) Received: from lurza.secnetix.de (localhost [IPv6:::1]) by lurza.secnetix.de (8.12.5/8.12.5) with ESMTP id g958DWmC093461; Sat, 5 Oct 2002 10:13:33 +0200 (CEST) (envelope-from oliver.fromme@secnetix.de) Received: (from olli@localhost) by lurza.secnetix.de (8.12.5/8.12.5/Submit) id g958DWIb093432; Sat, 5 Oct 2002 10:13:32 +0200 (CEST) Date: Sat, 5 Oct 2002 10:13:32 +0200 (CEST) Message-Id: <200210050813.g958DWIb093432@lurza.secnetix.de> From: Oliver Fromme To: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG, Kevin_Stevens@pursued-with.net Reply-To: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG, Kevin_Stevens@pursued-with.net Subject: Re: Thingie #2 - system upgrade methods. In-Reply-To: <20021004150421.K79505-100000@babelfish.pursued-with.net> X-Newsgroups: list.freebsd-questions User-Agent: tin/1.5.4-20000523 ("1959") (UNIX) (FreeBSD/4.6-STABLE (i386)) MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 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 Kevin Stevens wrote: > When there is a point release of -STABLE, there seem to be several methods > for doing a binary upgrade, but none seem to fit my preference, and I > wanted to post and see if I'm missing something. > [...] First of all, there are ways to do what you want, but they might not be suitable for newbies, because there are more things that could break if you don't know exactly what you are doing. > What I've been doing is downloading the boot floppies for the release, > booting from it/them, and selecting binary upgrade via FTP. Once this is > done things go rather smoothly. But it does require that I have a floppy > drive installed and physical access to the console, which isn't always > expedient. > > What I'd prefer to do is to get the whole floppy creation process out of > the mix. You could download the release manually with an FTP mirror program (such as /usr/ports/ftp/omi), for example: # omi -s ftp.freebsd.org -r /pub/FreeBSD/releases/i386/4.7-RELEASE \ -l /usr/local/tmp/4.7-RELEASE (-s specifies the server, -r the remote directory, -l the local directory which is the target of mirroring. Of course there should be enough free space.) The release consists of a bunch of subdirectories (bin, man, doc etc.), each of which contains a simple shell script called "install.sh". You can simply run those shell scripts, one after another, in single user mode to perform a binary update. You don't have to use sysinstall at all. However, doing that will OVERWRITE some files in /etc, /var and elsewhere. Therefore you must make a backup before. (The upgrade won't touch /usr/local, /home or any other parts which are not part of the base system, but it never hurts to have a backup of them anyway.) A good idea is probably to make a backup of /etc, restore it afterwards, and then run mergemaster (make sure that you also have /usr/src updated). Mergemaster will also take care of running MAKEDEV in /dev in case any device nodes have changed. > What I don't understand is why it isn't possible to simply download the > newrev version of sysinstall, and run *that* on the current system, You _can_ do that. Sysinstall is on the second floppy (mfsroot.flp). You have to mount the floppy image (you don't need a physical floppy disk, since you can use vnconfig(8) to mount a filesystem image file). It contains the MFS-root filesystem, which you have to copy, uncompress and mount in turn. Then you can copy sysinstall from it. # vnconfig -c vn0 mfsroot.flp # mount -o ro /dev/vn0c /mnt # cp /mnt/mfsroot.gz . # umount /mnt # vnconfig -u vn0 # gunzip mfsroot.gz # vnconfig -c vn0 mfsroot # (no .flp!) # mount -o ro /dev/vn0c /mnt # cp /mnt/stand/sysinstall . # umount /mnt # vnconfig -u vn0 # rm mfsroot But again, that's not a standard procedure, and it is particularly not recommended for newbies. If something breaks, you 're pretty much on your own. Also, it is always a good thing to have access to the system console. You don't necessarily have to be present in front of the machine, as it is possible to access the console remotely via a serial connection (COM1) using a terminal server or a modem. Regards Oliver -- Oliver Fromme, secnetix GmbH & Co KG, Oettingenstr. 2, 80538 München Any opinions expressed in this message may be personal to the author and may not necessarily reflect the opinions of secnetix in any way. 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