moving from 1.6.2 and 2.0.2 to 3.0

Steve Blinkhorn · *nix forums beginner Joined: 08 Mar 2005 Posts: 8

Are there any known dangers in migrating from 1.6.2 and 2.0.2 to 3.0
(i386 is my platform)? I have been caught out by the removal of
support (e.g. packages) for 1.6.2, and have several serious production
machines to upgrade. In particular, two of these are colocated on an
ISP's site. If upgrades there go wrong it's costly in all sorts of
ways.

I'd be grateful for people with experience to mention any snags they
found. I imagine /etc is sensitive in particular, but there's an
alarming sentence or two in the installation documentation about PAM
and possibly ending up unable to login if all does not go well with
postinstall.

--
Steve Blinkhorn <steve@prd.co.uk>

gdt@work.lexort.com · *nix forums beginner Joined: 09 May 2006 Posts: 4

I have updated from 1.6 to netbsd-2 and then netbsd-3 remotely without
console access by building and installing from source.

For one of these steps, and I'm not sure which, it's critical to
reboot with a new kernel and old userland because the new libc uses a
new system call.

I use etcmanage to update /etc, and find that this works very
reliably. Because it dealt with /etc correctly, I had no pam issues.

The code and scripts I use are at

https://acert.ir.bbn.com/projects/etcmanage/

Use the bits from anoncvs rather than the 0.2 release.

For machines at ISP sites, I would practice on local machines first,
pretending you can't touch them.

--
Greg Troxel <gdt@work.lexort.com>

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