W. D. wrote:
I can confirm that this is in fact possible, and not even difficult to accomplish. My home machine has gone from FreeBSD 2.2.8 to 4.7 without reinstall, and I disconnected the monitor and keyboard somewhere around 3.3.At 20:39 10/23/2002, Dan Pelleg, wrote:FreeBSD systems are easy to maintain. You can do a source upgrade,
or a binary upgrade, and the system will go through it and boot
to the new version without a hitch. On one system I have I've gone from
FreeBSD 4.1 to 4.7, including every release in between, without ever
touching the console. When a major version comes out, I typically
upgrade 10 systems in multiple locations, all within half a day
without leaving my office.>Pray tell, how do you do this? Start Here to Find It Fast!© -> http://www.US-Webmasters.com/best-start-page/
An upgrade consists of the following commands:
'cvsup -g -L2 stable-supfile && cd /usr/src/ && make buildworld && make buildkernel KERNCONF=whatever && make installkernel KERNCONF=whatever && make installworld && reboot'
Theoretically you could just paste those lines into a shellscript, make a crontab entry and be done, but I do recommend that you add some error checking and maybe some interaction with the user. Of course, this should _not_ be used on production or otherwise heavy loaded machines. Doing install in single user is recomended, but a box with very low loads will probably do it just fine running multi user.
Ive used this method for years (allthough not added to cron but started manually when I think it's needed) and it has only failed me once. When going from 4.6 to 4.7 I had to do a reboot between installkernel and installworld, or the system would fail with a lot of weird memory errors. Luckily, I always update my testmachine first, so when the time came to update the "real" machine I was aware of this and avoided the problem.
--
R
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