Greg Troxel wrote:
Carl Brewer <carl%bl.echidna.id.au@localhost> writes:I'm planning to bump two amd64 virtual servers from 5.2 to 6.1.5 or 7 tonight. In the past, I've over-written the kernel with the new version, rebooted, then untar'ed the OS tarballs, over-writing everything, then run postinstall to tidy up /etc, and it's "just worked" - everything in pkgsrc kept working (cyrus, sendmail) and my home-made compiled stuff did too (mostly older Plone instances) Any issues I might have doing that going from 5.2 to 6.1.5? Or, is it safe to jump straight to 7 doing that?I have updated 5->6, and have not tried 6->7. But surely others have.
I've done 6-7 on an amd64 and i386 systems as follows: 1. Install new kernel and reboot. 2. Untar 7.0 release sets onto 6.x system (while live) 3. Reboot again (probably not necessary)4. run etcupdate with the etc.tgz set as source to get /etc up to date (although the system ran fine with the 6.x etc) 5. Re-install all packages. I used binary packages build on another amd64 system using pkg_comp and pkg_chk. I did the upgrade install using pkg_chk but I've now switched to pkgin.
Packages were quite out of date before so this package upgrade process ended up replacing everything. If the packages were up to date I'd suggest a de-install/re-install of everything. Doing it with pkg_comp meant I was certain I had a coherent package set before I started to reduce the time spent with services down.
Only fallout I've had is down to the newer version of nagios in pkgsrc not working but based on the research I've done so far that's a nagios issue not a BSD issue. Haven't had time to resurrect that bit yet as its not critical to the server operation. Server runs dovecot/exim for IMAPS/SMTP services for my personal domain. Its also a Samba/NFS server for my local network.
Total time for this (excluding the pkg_comp setup and package building) was about an hour. Package updates were quick to install but I had to deal with a few bits of config file tweaking because I was coming from much older package configuration. I think I spent about an afternoon on it in total.
I've also done the same 6-7 process on an i386 laptop apart from the package step. On that system I just de-installed the packages and recompiled what I needed as I wasn't so bothered about the downtime in that scenario. Again the OS update step was quick and only the package updates took any serious time.
Took another laptop system from 5-6 using the same process. That system would have gone to 7.x as well but there is some issue with the drm driver finding the radeon BIOS that needs sorting first.
So unless you run into an issue with the drmkms code not liking your graphics chip the process you have used in the past should work just fine.
Mike