Re: Upgrading to 7.0 - stupid requirements

My server is live and serving customers. I can't afford to take the
box down for a whole day while I upgrade ports. Is there any
intelligent way to do this?

For example, could I do everything on a second disk while running the
live system on the first disk? For example using a chroot so it
thinks it's

For example, might this work?

1) upgrade system in the canonical way:
# make buildworld
# make buildkernel
# make installkernel
# reboot
# mergemaster -p
# make installworld
# mergemaster
# reboot

2) make sure misc/compat6x is installed

3) on a second disk or in a directory somewhere like /new
a) nullfs mount read-only all the things one needs inside a chroot to
work except /usr/local
b) create a writable /usr/local, /usr/X11R6, /compat/linux and /var/db
in the chroot

4) then for each package installed, install it within the chroot

5) when all that's done, drop into single-user mode and move
/usr/local, /usr/X11R6, /compat/linux, and /var/db/pkg to the real
system (saving the old ones)

6) reboot

Warning, I have never tried this.

-Mike

On Wed, Mar 19, 2008 at 11:47 AM, Oliver Fromme <olli@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Hello Marko,

I'm very sorry that you have trouble updating your FreeBSD
installation, but there are very good technical reasons to
update your packages, as others have already explained in
detail (i.e. library conflicts).

When I updated my home workstation from FreeBSD 6 to 7,
I used the opportunity to clean up my installed packages,
which was long overdue anyway.

First I saved the output from "pkg_info" in a file. Then
I edited it and removed everything that I don't need.
There was lots of superfluous crap in it, like ports that
I installed once out of curiosity but never continued to
use them, and ports that were installed as a dependency
once but aren't required anymore because the dependent
software is long gone.

Then I did "pkg_delete \*", checked for left-overs in
/usr/local because not everything was removed cleanly,
and then installed the ports from my text file again.
I chose to compile from ports instead of installing
precompiled packages because the machine is fairly fast
(if you have a slow machine, installing packages will
be much faster, of course).

It certainly went a lot quicker than if I had blindly
updated all ports without cleaning up. And now all of
my installed packages are guaranteed to be fresh and
up to date, and I only have the stuff on my harddisk
that I really need.

Really, such situations where you should update all of
your packages is the best opportunity to clean up the
mess that has accumulated on your disk in a long time.
I recommend that everyone considers doing that, too,
instead of blindly running portupgrade. Of course,
the latter would work, too, but it takes longer and
will rather add to the mess instead of cleaning it. ;-)

Best regards
Oliver

--
Oliver Fromme, secnetix GmbH & Co. KG, Marktplatz 29, 85567 Grafing b. M..
Handelsregister: Registergericht Muenchen, HRA 74606, Geschäftsfuehrung:
secnetix Verwaltungsgesellsch. mbH, Handelsregister: Registergericht Mün-
chen, HRB 125758, Geschäftsführer: Maik Bachmann, Olaf Erb, Ralf Gebhart

FreeBSD-Dienstleistungen, -Produkte und mehr: http://www.secnetix.de/bsd

Python is executable pseudocode. Perl is executable line noise.


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