upgrading without boot media

[Steve Blinkhorn <steve%prd.co.uk@localhost>]

I have several NetBSD systems running - everything from 1.6.2 to 3.1 -
and think it would be sensible now to bring everything up to 4.0.
Given NetBSD's elegance (any takers for flattery?) I would have thought
there ought to be a simple upgrade route that didn't involve booting
from removable media.  Actually I'm sure there is, because when I had
some problems with colo servers a couple of years back people on this
list helped me greatly.

BUT, there are, IIRC, a few gotchas on the way: making sure /etc/pam.d
is there, using the right options when unpacking sets and so forth.
The installation documentation rather assumes the kind of familiarity
with 'the usual issues' that goes with being constantly engaged in OS
matters - I'm a (very contented) user and spend most of my computing
hours in userland.   Other things like needing to add users and groups
by hand: does it matter how they are numbered? where should I look for
this information?   The installation documentation on use of
postinstall also strikes me as less tightly written than would give me
most comfort.

This message is partly prompted by problems I'm having creating a
bootable CD-R that can be read on one particular machine that has no
floppy drive - but I have a whole bunch of networked machines
available, with a CD image mounted and visible over NFS.

The trouble is, I know that when I am up to speed with these things
everything is straightforward really, it's just not cleanly and simply
documented anywhere I know to look.   Wouldn't it be generally useful
if it were?

--
Steve Blinkhorn <steve%prd.co.uk@localhost>