Upgrading Ancient FreeBSD install

D

dermot

Hi,

We have a few servers running *ancient* versions of FreeBSD - some as old as 5.3. These are production servers - one is a DNS server with an uptime of 1716 days - so we've been reeeeally reticent about upgrading them but I think it's way past time that we did.

Is there a safe way to do this or would I be better off just doing a clean install of 8.1 and moving configurations across?

is there a way to do this using images - i.e., install the OS in a virtual machine, configure and test the required daemons etc. and then move the VM installation to the physical machine?

Thanks in advance for your advice.

Dermot
 
dermot said:
We have a few servers running *ancient* versions of FreeBSD - some as old as 5.3. These are production servers - one is a DNS server with an uptime of 1716 days - so we've been reeeeally reticent about upgrading them but I think it's way past time that we did.
Click to expand...
Wooohooo.. I'm sure those servers can be rooted quite quickly.
Is there a safe way to do this or would I be better off just doing a clean install of 8.1 and moving configurations across?
Click to expand...
Best way would be to do a clean install.
 
dermot said:
is there a way to do this using images - i.e., install the OS in a virtual machine, configure and test the required daemons etc. and then move the VM installation to the physical machine?
Click to expand...

I'm not aware of a way to directly move the VM to a physical machine (which kind of VM are you speaking of?)

Maybe a dump of all partitions on the VM image? Then just create partitions on the new physical machine and restore the dump. It should be faster than cloning.
 
hansivers said:
I'm not aware of a way to directly move the VM to a physical machine (which kind of VM are you speaking of?)
Click to expand...

There are utilities to convert from the various VM disk image formats to raw disk images.

Maybe a dump of all partitions on the VM image? Then just create partitions on the new physical machine and restore the dump. It should be faster than cloning.
Click to expand...

It is. Like copying from one real computer to another, you may have to adjust for things like different Ethernet interfaces and disk drives. Labeled filesystems make it easier.
 
The recommended method for upgrading across multiple major releases is (from 5.x to 8.x):
  • upgrade to latest 5.x release
  • upgrade to 6.0
  • upgrade to latest 6.x release
  • upgrade to 7.0
  • upgrade to latest 7.x release
  • upgrade to 8.0
  • upgrade to latest 8.x release
However, you'd be better off doing a clean install on new hardware, installing all the needed ports, configuring them using data from the old server, testing the new install, and then just switch to using the new server.

Especially since the ports tree will have changed a lot since 5.x, and you'd need to rebuild the ports multiple times, and have to deal with several years worth of "gotchas" in /usr/ports/UPDATING.

Save yourself the agony, and just do a clean install. :)
 
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