On Wed, 9 Feb 2000, Tom Tarka wrote:

> Alternately, if the above is possible, and all I have to do is have the
> change the partition that the booter points at, I could probably have
> someone at the box's physical location (a few states away) do that

The natural way to do this is to have your agent change the partition
types with Mkfs, from "User" to "Root&User" for /usr/local, and / from
"Root" to "User", after you've set up the old /usr/local with the
new binaries, kernel, and new fstab. It's theoretically possible to
edit the partition table on a running system, but when I tried to do
that with the new 1.4.2_Alpha sysinstall, I really messed things up,
so I can't recommend it. (How's that for crazy?)

I think it would be easier to untar the kernel and sets in place, then
run diff over /etc and the extracted etc.tgz set, and edit by hand,
unless you don't have the space. As long as you keep the old shared
libraries, (most of) the old 1.3.x packages should run fine. Some
binaries in the base distribution have moved around, so you'd have to
remove the old ones by hand (after rebooting!) When you go to clean
the libs, just keep the highest minor version for each major version.