Craig Skinner wrote on Sat, May 27, 2006 at 07:13:27PM +0100: > On Sat, May 27, 2006 at 02:32:20PM +0200, Ingo Schwarze wrote: > >> If the machine you are talking about is in any way important and >> if you want to be reasonably sure it will work reliably, you are >> probably best off backing up your data and reinstalling from scratch. > > Once rsnapshot was pointed out to me in packages, I reinstall at every > release. A new car is better than an upgraded one...
This comparison does _not_ apply, in my humble opinion. >From OpenBSD 2.7 up to about 3.4 i used to reinstall at every release, too. When i started upgrading instead, not only did the downtimes decrease, but i introduced fewer configuration bugs while i was about it. The official upgrade script is very robust and very easy to use. When your goals are correctness, reliability and efficiency, upgrading to each new release is probably better than reinstalling each new release, both for a typical server and for a typical workstation, unless you have special requirements. Once more some time later, when i started using OpenBSD-binary-upgrade (created by Han Boetes), upgrade downtime went down close to zero - without causing noticeable problems of other kinds. Of course using OpenBSD-binary-upgrade only makes sense when you known reasonably well what you are doing, it is officially unsupported, so if it breaks, you keep the pieces. It is not as robust as the official upgrade script, so if you do not know what you are doing, chances are you *will* wreak havoc while trying to use it. To reiterate, i do not advise against upgrading, quite to the contrary. But i do advise against multi-step upgrades - e.g., if you must go from 3.4 to 3.9, you should better reinstall. Yours, Ingo -- Ingo Schwarze <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
