Re: NEWBIE: Best way to upgrade?

From: Dave Uhring (daveuhring_at_yahoo.com)
Date: 06/18/05 

Date: Fri, 17 Jun 2005 23:12:25 -0500

On Sat, 18 Jun 2005 03:25:20 +0000, russell kym horsell wrote:

> Dave Uhring <daveuhring@yahoo.com> wrote:
>> On Fri, 17 Jun 2005 11:52:33 +0100, Steve P wrote:
>> > On 2005-06-17, Dave Uhring <daveuhring@yahoo.com> wrote:
>> >> http://openbsd.org/faq/upgrade37.html
>> > Full step by step instructions, just what I need, I will get to work on it as
>> > soon as I have finished beating myself for asking a question that is in an FAQ
>> If you are running a web server on that Netra, be sure that you do not
>> overwrite your /var/www with etc37.tgz. I created a modified etc37.tgz by
>> unpacking the original in /tmp, then removing the entire /tmp/var and
>> /tmp/root directories.
>
>
> Just so *I'm* clear on this. ;-)
>
> "Upgrade" doesn't normally unpack etcVVV and clobber /etc (or /var).
> Unless one has been careful in the past (I have a mixed record ;-)
> some configs on /etc have been
> hacked (most likely rc.conf) even unpacking etcVVV by hand and
> overwriting things on /etc can cause some things to go bad.

We were dicussing a live upgrade rather than booting from floppy or cdrom.

> But while the system normally boots with a new /bsd and old /etc/*, there
> may also be problems with leaving things at the normal "upgrade".

None serious. I upgraded five servers that way.

> As all the neat people know, putting "overrides" to rc.conf in rc.conf.local
> (or some such) and leaving rc.conf as the distr version is the way to go for
> that one. Unfortunately, not all other tools/confs are as clean.

In no way do you want to blindly unpack the new etc37.tgz into /. For one
thing you will overwrite /etc/master.passwd.

My caveat in particular referred to /var/www/conf/httpd.conf, which is
included in etc37.tgz. Would you want to recreate a dozen virtual hosts
on a web server?

Although I did not mention it, /var/named/etc/named.conf is also replaced
with an unthinking unpacking of etc37.tgz. If you are hosting a number of
domains would you like to rebuild that file on both of your DNS servers?

> I find the biggest pain in upgd is later unpacking the etcVVV someplace and
> diff-ing (with a little /tmp/script) all the new etc files with the extant,
> ones, removing anything that is the same (90%, usually), copying over
> any "don't cares" like services, protocols, etc. and inspecting the rest
> and adjusting by hand. Even passwd and groups these days can't simply be
> ignored due to creeping priv seps.

Follow the procedure in the FAQ but be aware of what you are doing. The
FAQ does tell you which new /etc/master.passwd and /etc/group entries must
be added.

The upgrade from 3.6 to 3.7 was actually quite painless. Going from 3.5
to 3.7 on some of my servers required a bit of extra work.

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