Question:
This has been a long-standing problem of mine, but I always ignored
it hoping it would go away on its own with a future 6.x release, but
it remains...
No matter whether I boot into safe mode or regular mode, with all
kernel extensions disabled in /boot/loader.conf, I get the following
panic late at boot of a fresh RELENG_6_2 kernel (with only a few
services left to bring up). The 6.x kernels I've tried all build and
installed cleanly without any errors...
Answer:
I usually perform those steps after I've rebooted to ensure that my
system will boot off the new kernel, as per the instructions in the
FreeBSD handbook.
How well does simply upgrading with the CD work (as opposed to wiping
clean)? I've upgraded several times to new releases simply by
rebuilding world, it has never failed me in the past. I don't doubt
what you are saying here, but since I will have to change how I work,
assuming that I can boot off of the 6.2 CD, I'd appreciate any
general upgrade tips that don't involve wiping the disk clean (which
is not really an option).
For instance, is rebuilding world between point releases (e.g. 5.4 to
5.5) an okay idea, compared to across major releases (e.g. 5.5 to 6.2)?
I'll do my own homework regarding this too, but I appreciate any
nuggets of wisdom you might have! As far as me being an expert, I
guess I'd categorize me somewhere in between complete newb and
FreeBSD developer =)
My production system is backed up daily to two different sites,
that's not an issue. The system I'm thinking of upgrading to 6.2 is
my test server I run out of my house that stores movie files and
other non-essential files. Technically, wiping it clean *would* be an
option if it came down to it, just an inconvenience. Perhaps I should
invest in another HD to use for instances such as this.
This works great for servers, that don't have any real users on them,
and is pretty much how I do things. I'll try updating the ports tree
and installing from that rather than building the old fashioned way,
because that works a surprising percentage of the time.
On desktop and development systems, the users tend to get pissed if I
let things get that old. So I do upgrade them more often. There are a
couple of things you can do to make reinstalling to a clean disk a bit
less painfull.
1) Intelligent file system layout. I put all the things that aren't
installed from the FreeBSD disks on their own partitions (/home and
/local). I can then wipe and reinstall /, /var and /usr without
clobbering the non-system data.
2) Mirrored disks. Disks for consumer systems are cheap. Throwing a
second one in a system and mirroring the system disk is a cheap way to
improve the reliability of the system. When it's time to upgrade, take
a drive out of the mirror, and install to that drive. You can reboot
to the old system if you need to interrupt the process and run the old
system for some reason. With a file system layout as per #1, you can
even mount the users files under both versions of the OS. When you're
happy with the new system, mirror the new system drive to the old one.
Neither of these is an excuse for not backing up your data before you
start the process. Given the above, the backups are for disaster
recovery, so you don't need full level 0 dumps, just up-to-date
incrementals. So if you're running daily backups, this should be easy:
drop into single user, and run an incremental since the last daily,
which typically takes me a few minutes.
