upgrade advice needed svp

B

bigearsbilly

Hello people, I am running
FreeBSD foghorn 7.1-RELEASE
GENERIC amd64

I am getting lots of panics and freezes.
I would like to upgrade to 7.2.

What should I do? (easiest)
clean install or upgrade?

note, I am no newbie so am not afraid of
building from source. But I am lazy.

I would like to not have to set up
all my config, databases apache etc. if possible.
or should I just tar up /etc and /usr/local/etc ?
and do a clean build?


any advice?
 
As you are using a generic kernel, the easiest way is to use freesd-update and do a binary update.

Syntax for a minor update from 7.1 to 7.2 and some detailed information can be found in the release announcement under FreeBSD Update

But in short:
Code: 
freebsd-update upgrade -r 7.2-RELEASE
freebsd-update install
shutdown -r now
freebsd-update install
shutdown -r now

However do take backups of all your databases, info etc, and if possible do the upgrade on a console and not over ssh in case there is a problem. And there is no need to rebuild the installed ports as long as you do a upgrade between minor version(7.1->7.2).
 
If you're getting lots of panics and freezes, make sure your hardware is OK. Also note that panics and freezes tend to occur at the most inconvenient moments, i.e. halfway through an installworld. If you're sure your hardware is OK, backup what you need, make a note of all installed ports (and backup /var/db/ports/*), and start with a fresh install.
 
Thank you very much, chaps.

Well hardware, phew! How can one really tell?
my mobo and disks are quite new, admittedly my PSU is
years old. No S.M.A.R.T issues.
i've done a memtest86 for 7+ hours no problems
(does memtest ever stop?)
Mostly graphical freezes (I've never been totally convinced with NVIDIA), occasional reboots but VirtualBox is giving "sleeping thread" panics.
It tends to happen I think generally with more intense graphical stuff. Often I think I'm in a browser.

I've started to use linux a bit to see if that does it too.
It doesn't seem to so far. but I haven't migrated fully.
but it's like a step backward for me, I don't want to go back there really.

Backups naturally I'd do,
I'd drop into single user mode
and do the upgrade anyhow which would probably be OK.
 
What NVIDIA driver are you using? The binary 3D driver? Because that isn't stable on a amd64 system, it's only for the i386 version. That might be the cause for your problems.
 
well, My new case and PSU has arrived in the post,
I'll see if that does it!

thanks people.

it seems to happen all the time using VirtualBox,
but I have had freezes before.
I need to properly document it i think.
I've inspected my core dumps and vboxdrv.ko
 is a suspect.
 
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