Solved Upgrading from 11.1 to 11.2 on offline airgapped system

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pford1066

I was wondering if anyone has any advice to give on this subject. I currently have a system that is not internet connected, for security reasons, at FreeBSD 11.1. I would like to upgrade this server to 11.2. I also have another server that is on the internet, that I have already upgraded successfully with freebsd-update -r 11.2-RELEASE upgrade.

I have read suggestions on some posts here that you can tar up the content of /var/db/freebsd-update, and copy that to the target server via removable media, and then run freebsd-update on the target server. This did not work for me, as it still wanted to download a mirror list and do a fetch. It seems to me that the upgrade command always wants to do a successful fetch first.

Is anyone aware of any supported way to upgrade a server that cannot be put online (via freebsd-update or another method)? Would I be better off building a new server at 11.2?

Many thanks for any advice!
 
You could do a source upgrade. It's going to take more time but can be done completely "offline". All you need is a /usr/src/ tree with the appropriate version of the code.

You might need to update the installed packages on that machine too, but those can easily be fetched on a different machine and transferred to the air-gapped machine.
 
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