Date: Sat, 5 Oct 2002 10:13:32 +0200 (CEST) From: Oliver Fromme <olli@secnetix.de> To: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG, Kevin_Stevens@pursued-with.net Subject: Re: Thingie #2 - system upgrade methods. Message-ID: <200210050813.g958DWIb093432@lurza.secnetix.de> In-Reply-To: <20021004150421.K79505-100000@babelfish.pursued-with.net>
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Kevin Stevens <Kevin_Stevens@pursued-with.net> 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.
"All that we see or seem is just a dream within a dream" (E. A. Poe)
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