Date: Wed, 28 Dec 2005 03:20:08 +0200 From: Giorgos Keramidas <keramida@ceid.upatras.gr> To: David Bear <David.Bear@asu.edu> Cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: upgrade by hand Message-ID: <20051228012008.GC8568@flame.pc> In-Reply-To: <20051227220552.GB16689@asu.edu> References: <20051227220552.GB16689@asu.edu>
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On 2005-12-27 15:05, David Bear <David.Bear@asu.edu> wrote:
> In all the searches I've done about upgrade from a Rel4.x to Rel6. all
> the info seems to center on using cvsup and port upgrade, and using
> Rel5 is an intermediate step to get to Rel6.
That's right. It should always be possible to use the latest version of
RELENG_X to build and install version RELENG_Y when (Y = X + 1). The
same is not always true for two major branches ahead.
> Maybe I just like pain, but are there any instructions for 'manually'
> upgrading from 'most any prior freebsd' to latest production release?
I've upgraded systems from 4.7-RELEASE to 6.0-CURRENT in more than one
steps: one for 4.7 ==> 5.3-RELEASE, 5.3-RELEASE ==> 5-STABLE, and then
finally, 5-STABLE ==> 6.0-CURRENT.
The process of building and installing everything is always the same:
buildworld, buildkernel, installkernel, boot single user, installworld,
mergemaster. Any extra steps required every time are described in
detail in /usr/src/UPDATING after the source tree is updated at each
upgrade step.
> In other words, what files MUST be backed up and restored
> (master.password, etc) and what CANNOT be reused (changes to current
> password/group files or other files are too much to allow an upgrade
> of this type)
A full backup is wise, at this point. If something goes wrong after 2
or 3 build & install cycles, it's nice to be able to go back to a
well-known, stable state.
> I'm just concerned about Freebsd base -- I only use 3 items from the
> ports collection and I don't mind rebuilding these.
>
> (perhaps I'm stuck on the word 'upgrade' when there is a better word
> for a format and reload but preserve user/group/file system mode bits
> etc)
Are you installing 6.0-RELEASE from scratch or building from source?
If you are installing from scratch, reformatting the partitions too
(which is the only way to reformat the partitions to use UFS2 instead of
UFS1), then it's still a good idea to start with a full backup. If you
have the installation disks of the original FreeBSD version, and you
don't mind a little extra downtime, you can even create 2 sets of backup
files:
- Original FreeBSD version of the base system
- Your current base system installation
Then go ahead and install FreeBSD 6.0-RELEASE. You can compare the
files of the two backup sets, i.e. by looking at the output of commands
like:
# tar tzvf backup-freebsd-plain.tar.gz | sort -k +9 > /tmp/before.txt
# tar tzvf backup-freebsd.tar.gz | sort -k +9 > /tmp/after.txt
This should give you a good idea of what files are different in your
current installation from the original FreeBSD files, and you can
selectively restore on top of FreeBSD 6.0-RELEASE the changes that you
want to keep :)
- Giorgos
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