On Tue, 14 Mar 2017, Jeremy C. Reed wrote:
Does anyone know where I can find old 3.1 packages for i386?
Damn, that could be tough. I just looked and my oldest go back to 4.x only. I burn a DVD or write a tape with the pkg_tarup versions of all my packages before I upgrade. However, I didn't have my ***t together back then, I guess.
I am working on an old system that the hosting provider only has a Windows-based KVM. I am concerned upgrading it headless.
Whoa. Yeah, that would make me nervous, too. Hopefully you at least have console access (I mean to the guest's console via KVM).
I know our upgrade docs have tips of upgrade issues, and I could attempt upgrading 3 to 4, 4 to 5, 5 to 6, 6 to 7. But I'd rather not spend days on this. Anyone have any suggestions?
Uhhh, yeah, if I had to put my own money down, I wouldn't bet on that being successful. Also, as you say, it's going to be slow. It's going to be REALLY slow on an unaccelerated KVM instance (IIRC, Windows has no acceleration).
Maybe easiest is to just install a new system and migrate data and configs over to it.
If it were me, I'd try that first. You could use a copy/snapshot to do it and thus if it went horribly wrong/ugly, you could always start over. I guess for me it'd all depend on how hairy the applications were. If it was just static apache or a BAMP stack, then no sweat. I'd upgrade. If it's a situation where I'd have to keep library linkages to ancient libs because of dynamic binaries in the app, I'd sit down and have a good cry, then cross my fingers and try a clobber-install of 7.x. If that didn't work, I'd do the upgrade-script shuffle you are trying to avoid.
-Swift