Kris Kennaway wrote:
>On Thu, Mar 15, 2007 at 05:09:57PM -0400, Jerry McAllister wrote:
>>On Thu, Mar 15, 2007 at 04:47:06PM -0400, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
>>
>>>First off, I want to thank the people who responded to my thread
>>>"Stability Issues on a 5.4-RELEASE box" a couple of weeks ago; after
>>>disabling hyperthreading, getting a clean run of Memtest back, and
>>>doing some serious fsck'ing of the disks, the box appears to now be
>>>completely stable. I'm still not sure which of the above fixed the
>>>problem...but I'll take a stable system at this point. :-)
>>>
>>>That said, in that thread I had asked about the advisability of
>>>upgrading to 6.2, and it was intelligently pointed out that doing so in
>>>pursuit of stability was a bad idea. Now that the box is stable,
>>>though, I'm back to the same question: should I make the upgrade, and
>>>if so, how should I do it?
>>>
>>>My primary driver for doing so would be to keep current enough that I'm
>>>still getting security and other patches on a regular basis, and that I
>>>can upgrade my applications from ports as necessary. If this is not an
>>>issue, then my only remaining concern would be that it's usually easier
>>>to get support on lists like this if you're running a modern version of
>>>the OS (that's certainly the case with the OpenBSD folks).
>>>
>>>My primary concern with upgrading is that the box is in Portland, OR,
>>>and I'm in Arlington, VA...and while the ISP is friendly, I doubt that
>>>I could count on them for major system recovery if I botch something
>>>during the upgrade. My other worry is that I don't want to break
>>>existing apps if possible (the main one I'm concerned about is
>>>Zope/Plone). This is a production box with moderate traffic, and it
>>>would be a problem if there was extensive downtime.
>>>
>>>Is it worth upgrading? If so, what's the best way to do so -- CVSup, or
>>>some other way? Are there any major caveats if I do choose to upgrade
>>>(or choose to stay with the existing OS)?
>>You should if you can reasonably do it, for the reasons you give plus
>>improvements in performance and in some utilities.
>>
>>My sentiment is usually to do a clean install over major version numbers.
>>It tends to leave less dross laying around. but I do not have to worry
>>about down times very much, a couple of hours at night is not terribly
>>noticable in my stuff. It does require more time down to do a clean
>>from scratch install. But, I think you can get away with a cvsup
>>upgrade from 5.4 to 6.2. Then your downtime is just the reboot and
>>stuff at single user (mergemaster), plus probably some for upgrading
>>various ports.
>
>Yes, a source upgrade from 5.x to 6.x (followed by portupgrade -fa)
>isn't too bad. As with any upgrade you do need a recovery strategy
>though.
>
>Kris
I agree with both Kris and Jerry. Besides, if you run 6.2 you're running
a supported version of FreeBSD whereas 5.4 isn't supported anymore (5.5
is the last supported version in the legacy 5.x branch). Plus there are
slight improvements from 5.x to 6.x.
