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Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.carno.net.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!munnari.OZ.AU!news.mel.connect.com.au!news.syd.connect.com.au!news.bri.connect.com.au!fjholden.OntheNet.com.au!corolla.OntheNet.com.au!not-for-mail From: Tony Griffiths <tonyg@OntheNet.com.au> Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc Subject: Re: FreeBSD upgrade question Date: Thu, 24 Apr 1997 11:36:48 +1000 Organization: On the Net (ISP on the Gold Coast, Australia) Lines: 47 Message-ID: <335EB930.115F@OntheNet.com.au> References: <335E2C56.53BD@inJapan.net> Reply-To: tonyg@OntheNet.com.au NNTP-Posting-Host: swanee.nt.com.au Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Mailer: Mozilla 3.0 (WinNT; I) To: doug@inJapan.net Xref: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc:39658 Doug Lerner wrote: > > I have loved using FreeBSD the last couple of years. Our two FreeBSD > machines are the most stable in our office, which consists mostly of > Macs and a few Windows 95 <shudder> machines. > > One of our machines is still running a DX2 with 16MB of RAM and 1GB HD > and running FreeBSD 2.05. It has been faithfully providing DNS, mail, > news and Radius password checking for our office with nary a complaint. > > Our newer machine is a Pentium 133MHz with 32MB of RAM and 1GB HD > running FreeBSD 2.1. Right now it is only running secondary DNS and I > have just put an Apache web server on it. > > My question is...should I upgrade to the latest versions of FreeBSD? Most definitely... The 2.2.1 version is proving very stable on our 'new' news server. Also, there are lots of improvements in memory handling in the 2.1+ releases that should make the machines run faster! > > If so, can such an upgrade be done without losing any of our current > setup, or does such an upgrade require us first backing everything up, > redoing the whole system and then restoring everything? Yes, and no... I upgraded one machine from 2.1.0 -> 2.1.7.1 without problems! The upgrade saves the /etc directory and restores most things but you might still need to merge in changes in the sysconfig file. I also tried to upgrade a 2.1.5 system to 2.2.1 and while the upgrade worked, I had trouble getting Squid (Web cacheing proxy) to work. It failed on a DNS lookup [gethostbyname()] because of a shared library/header file mismatch somewhere. Eventually, I simply saved /etc and /usr/local/... somewhere else and totally re-installed 2.2.1 and then restored those files/directories I want on the new system. This solved all my previous problems and the machine is working great. So the answer is: Upgrade but backup everything you want beforehand and be prepared for a re-install if things don't work as expected. Also, for existing 2.1.x binaries, have the compat20 and 21 stuff handy if going to 2.2.1 ! Tony