On Tue, May 22, 2012 at 3:43 AM, Richards, Toby <toby.richa...@slo.courts.ca.gov> wrote: > While my question involves other BSD's as well as Linux systems, I am > asking this here because OpenBSD's philosophy is the most attractive > to me. > > I've got about 50 servers to manage. OpenBSD does have an Upgrade > option, but does it upgrade the installed packages? As far as I can > tell, it does not. I do very much appreciate the technology that has > come from the OpenBSD project, yet it seems to me that most *free* > operating systems do not fully support an upgrade path. I can't [fully] > upgrade from one OpenBSD release to another (unless following STABLE > gets me from one RELEASE to another, but AFAIK it does not). I cannot > seamlessly upgrade from Free/PC-BSD 8.x to 9.x. Instead I must > re-install from scrach. The same goes for CentOS/RHEL 5.x to 6.x, and > for every version of Mint Linux.
OpenBSD is only one free OS which supports full upgrade path without issues (confirmed with practice and use of various OS including Windows/Mac) and it's unbelievable easy and quick: 1) Upgrade base OS (from ISO or booting from bsd.rd) 2) reboot 3) sysmerge(8) step 4) upgrade.html 5) pkg_add -ui > > The two major commercial operating systems (considered to be evil by > the FOSS community) easily upgrade from one version to the next. That's > important in a real-life production environment. In 2001, I upgraded > 200 workstations and 7 servers from Windows NT 4.0 to Windows 2000 > without incident. I've had similar experience with all subsiquent > MicroEvil systems. I do hate MicroEvil, but I can make only limited > conclusions regarding the upgrade paths of other operating systems: If you are used to one platform for years then any other OS is hard from start ;-) Because you don't know proper tools/steps which leads you to thinking that those OSs are wrong. > > 1) Your project exists only for the sake of doing the project, and for > the technologies that it produces (such as OpenSSH). No it exists because devs need such an OS and a lot of us too. BTW a lot of other projects/companies is using fruit from OpenBSD like security technologies, OpenSSH, code, tmux, pf (look at Mac and other BSDs ;-) and so on. > > 2) Folks are expected to install a version of OpenBSD, but not upgrade > because there's no reason to fix something that isn't broken. Wrong. Folks are expected mostly to run current. If not then use supported releases. If they are not then they are on their own field. > > 3) OpenBSD is only for organizations who have so few servers or so many > IT folks that re-installing everything from scratch is not inviably > cumbersome. Fail. See eg. http://www.undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=20110420080633 , there's more, but some of the uses can't be spoken up openly ;-) > > 4) I am oblivious to some upgrade path technique for FOSS operating > systems. See my 5 points above or download current sources and build current version (instead of point 1.) http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/man.cgi?query=release&apropos=0&sektion=0&manpath=OpenBSD+Current&arch=i386&format=html . It's quick anyway on modern HW. > > Please enlighten me. > > Respectfully Submitted, > R. Toby Richards > Network Administrator > Superior Court of California > In and for the County of San Luis Obispo > (805) 781-4150
