Upgrade from 7.3-STABLE to 8.0-RELEASE

H

haroldclement

Good day,

I am running FreeBSD 7.3-STABLE and I want to upgrade to FreeBSD 8.0-RELEASE.

Could anyone help me out here by giving me a few tips on the correct approach? or isn't this possible?

Thanks in advance.

Harold
 
There are several ways to do that. They all start with a full backup of all your data including config files in /boot, /etc, and /usr/local/etc, home dirs, everything. If possible, it's often better and quicker to install a new copy of FreeBSD-8 to a new hard drive. Then you can copy over data and config files from the old drive.

The various ways to upgrade are in the Handbook chapter on updating and upgrading.
 
Thank you for your response.

I am new to FreeBSD so appologies if my questions are a bit dumb ;)

Following up on your advice I tried using the freebsd-update command to update my system.

[CMD=]freebsd-update -r 8.0-RELEASE upgrade[/CMD]

However it fails to fetch the metadata signature.

Code: 
Looking up update.FreeBSD.org mirrors... 3 mirrors found.
Fetching metadata signature for 7.3-STABLE from update4.freebsd.org... failed.
Fetching metadata signature for 7.3-STABLE from update5.freebsd.org... failed.
Fetching metadata signature for 7.3-STABLE from update2.freebsd.org... failed.
No mirrors remaining, giving up.

Any ideas what could be wrong with the system?

In the process I updated my ports tree with:

[CMD=""]portsnap fetch update[/CMD]

I can also succesfully resolve the update4.freebsd.org from the system.

Thanks in advance for your help in this.

Harold
 
freebsd-update doesn't work with the -STABLE or -CURRENT branches, only the -RELEASE branches. And that's why it doesn't find any meta signatures. My suggestion would be either a complete reinstall of 8.0-RELEASE(once you have backed up important data) or recompile your 7.3-STABLE as a 7.3-RELEASE and then use freebsd-update for the move to 8.0-RELEASE.

Either way. Do the backup, then choose you path. A fresh installation is probably the simplest way.
 
Thanks for clearing that up for me. It's running on one of the ESX hosts so i'll go for the re-install as suggested.

Thanks for your time and support.

Harold
 
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