Upgrading Antique FreeBSD Systems |
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At work, as part of an acquisition a few years back, I got more than a dozen FreeBSD servers to manage. This was a decent sized addition to the group of Solaris and Linux systems I already am responsible for. I've been a BSD admin for over a decade now, so adding some BSD into the fold was not a concern for me. But when I got my hands on the systems and was able to login and poke around, that all changed. What I found was a bunch of FreeBSD 4.x systems, a couple FreeBSD 5.x systems, and tons of outdated port installs without notes on build options. Running a portaudit on each box was an embarrassment. My original plan was to fully upgrade each server to the latest 6.x and rebuild all ports. After digging through each system and it's services, I dove in and got to work. The easiest systems were the 5.x ones. A few pitfalls here and there with port options, but nothing major. Working on the 4.x systems was a different story. Some good progress was made, but at some point, the ports system stopped supporting FreeBSD 4. This meant I could not update or install ports without jumping through hoops, and sometimes not at all.Then, updating to 6 from 4 was a poorly documented process that often didn't go well at all. Thankfully, some of the 4.x servers just died, and I was able to replace with new hardware and clean OS install. A few of the more difficult 4.x servers remain, though. Thankfully, I have found some links (listed below) with some very helpful information. Hopefully, with these on hand, I can finally complete this project.
Image: FreeBSD |
Misc.