Upgrade query

[Matthew Seaman]

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On Wed, Aug 02, 2006 at 03:16:12PM +0100, James wrote:
> Thanks for the advice so far.
>=20
> I wasn't expecting this to be a doddle, but now I'm truelly realising I h=
ave
> my work cut out for me on this one...

Having just done precisely what you are asking about (well -- not
really finished yet, but mostly there), I can confirm that it takes a
bit of work, but it isn't horrendously difficult.  A complete nuke and
repave of the machine has chewed up a lot of CPU cycles, but the
result feels just as fast and a number of annoying glitches have
disappeared and there's was quite a lot of stuff from the ports that
didn't work on 4.x anymore.

Couple of tips:

    i) Make sure you have backups of your original config available to
       work from after doing the restore.  You will definitely need
       copies of /etc, /usr/local/etc, /usr/X11R6/lib/X11 and /var.
       Just tarring everything up and untarring it in a scratch
       directory as soon as you've got your system running 6.x

   ii) Running 'mergemaster -s' before you do the update will show you
       where you've modified in /etc of your 4.x system so you can
       apply similar changes to the 6.x system.  However, so much has
       changed in /etc that blindly copying config files back into
       place will lead to disaster.  Use of sdiff(1) to merge changes
       from old files into new ones is recommended.

  iii) Your password file cannot simply be copied from 4.x to 6.x --
       there are a number of system account changes that need to be
       accounted for.  The best strategy I found was to reinstall any
       ports that add user accounts and then to use pw(8) to
       regenerate the user accounts for any real users (you can
       cut'n'paste the crypt text of the password if necessary, but
       you should make anyone still with a DES encrypted password
       change password to get at least something MD5 based.

   iv) If your ports are completely up to date under 4.x you should
       probably be able to just copy the 4.x config files into place
       in /usr/local/etc or /usr/X11R6/lib/X11.

    v) Remember to copy the SSH host keys from the old system
       (/etc/ssh/ssh_host*key*), or put up with people complaining
       about ssh moaning at them for weeks.

It's mostly repetetive, and not actually particularly difficult.  The
hardest bit is the planning exactly what to do.

       Cheers,

       Matthew

--=20
Dr Matthew J Seaman MA, D.Phil.                       7 Priory Courtyard
                                                      Flat 3
PGP: http://www.infracaninophile.co.uk/pgpkey         Ramsgate
                                                      Kent, CT11 9PW

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