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Date:      Thu, 27 Dec 2001 23:09:22 +0000
From:      Scott Mitchell <scott.mitchell@mail.com>
To:        Paolo Losi <paolo@linux.netline.it>
Cc:        freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: CURRENT and STABLE on the same HD: any clever recipe?
Message-ID:  <20011227230922.A90501@localhost>
In-Reply-To: <20011227215246.A24756@linux.netline.it>; from paolo@linux.netline.it on Thu, Dec 27, 2001 at 09:52:46PM %2B0100
References:  <20011227215246.A24756@linux.netline.it>

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On Thu, Dec 27, 2001 at 09:52:46PM +0100, Paolo Losi wrote:
> Hello everyone,
> 	I'm trying to put STABLE and CURRENT on the same HD and looking for
> a clever way to do that. It would be nice to have 2 distinct slices for 
> the installation...
> Any ideas?
> 	Thanks
> 	Paolo

Hi Paolo,

I've just done this myself; it turned out to be surprisingly easy in the
end.  The FreeBSD slices on my disk are laid out like this:

ad0s1a = / for STABLE install
ad0s1b = swap, shared by both installs
ad0s1e = /var for STABLE install
ad0s1f = /usr for STABLE install
ad0s1g = /tmp & /var/tmp (symlinked together), shared by both installs

ad0s2a = / for CURRENT install
ad0s2e = /var for CURRENT install
ad0s2f = /usr for CURRENT install
ad0s2g = /local/0, shared by both installs

If I was to add a second disk to this box, it would be mounted on /local/1.

/usr/{src,obj,local,ports,X11R6} and /home are symlinked to appropriate
directories on the large /local/0 partition -- separate /usr/src and
/usr/obj for each install, of course.  This partitioning scheme was
suggested by Nik Clayton; it keeps everything whose size is pretty much
fixed in small dedicated partitions, and everything that will grow over the
life of the system on the same big partition -- less chance that you'll run
out of space on (say) /home and have to start sylinking things into
/usr/local, or whatever.

I did the initial install from a 4.4 CD -- set up all the slices and
partitions as above, but didn't set mountpoints for the CURRENT-only
partitions.  Then just to see if it wll worked, did a second 4.4 install on
the CURRENT partitions, with the shared stuff mounted appropriately.  With
BootEasy as the boot manager, I can select which install to use simply by
hitting F1 or F2 at boot time.  Sysinstall and booteasy all appear to be
perfectly happy with this arrangement; the two installs don't interfere
with each other at all, as far as I can see.

I've upgraded one install to -STABLE and will get the other one up to
-CURRENT over the weekend, hopefully.  I chose to do this with a local
mirror of the CVS repository in /home/ncvs, from which I can checkout and
build whatever versions I want... you could also just run two cvsup jobs to
update your respective -CURRENT and -STABLE /usr/src directories.  It
probably doesn't make much difference which method you use, unless you're
making extensive local changes that you want to check in to a local
repository.

Hope that all makes sense; let me know if you need any more details.

Cheers,

	Scott

-- 
===========================================================================
Scott Mitchell          | PGP Key ID | "Eagles may soar, but weasels
Cambridge, England      | 0x54B171B9 |  don't get sucked into jet engines"
scott.mitchell@mail.com | 0xAA775B8B |      -- Anon

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