Re: Upgrade 8.4-STABLE to 14-STABLE

> On Jan 26, 2024, at 23:55, Odhiambo Washington <odhiambo@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Is there a way to upgrade 8.4-STABLE to 14-STABLE, or even change it to 14-RELEASE?

Most people are saying what my own thought would be, but I do have a "war story" to share.

For us, preserving configuration did not matter, our configuration management was done by a tool like Puppet or Chef or Ansible.

Dayjob has several single machines in very remote places, that were built with a too-small boot partition for FreeBSD-update to work (some had been in place since 5.x).  And we needed to do upgrades during a global pandemic, when the normal "go on-site to upgrade" process would not have worked.  Maybe your own situation is the same.

Some sites had remote consoles, some only remote serial consoles.  Availability of PXEboot was minimal, and bios access was even more minimal.

Where there *was* remote hands, they were much more comfortable installing Linux.

What worked for me was extracting the contents of an MFSBSD build over into my /boot direclory, and pumping my existing ip addresses, netmask, and gateway into /boot/loader.conf

On reboot, I had the ability to SSH in, clear out my disks, and start clean.

It took me a long time to mentally reach that point, and I only got it after I was sure all the other options (pxe boot an installer, freebsd-update, make buildworld, get-a-rescue-shell and just extract base.txz over my main filesystem).  Thanks to this being the 21st century, I was able to test a lot of my procedures on VMs of various flavors like VirtualBox and VMware.

If you're still on 8.x, you may still be at the point where you have separate /usr, /var, and / partitions, and at some point, one of those will grow beyond what you've done.  So even if the upgrades all work, you're in a situation that will burn you (kernels and /boot partitions keep getting bigger, until modern BSD where it's all one partition).

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With modern FreeBSD *most* of your configuration comes down to what's in /usr/local/etc, and /etc -- these tar up really easily, as well as /usr/home or /home or whatever.

If you have database stuff like postgres or mysql, obviously there's that directory as well.

Your base packages, you can list out without dependencies with "pkg leaf".  If pkg leaf doesn't work, copy a modern /usr/local/etc/pkg.conf from another machine to get that command (or run the command it is aliased do). 

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That said...

If the disk sizes *are* good (freebsd-update doesn't check), I might *try* to get there with freebsd-update, but with the knowledge that it's going to take me like a dozen leap-of-faith reboots, and more often than not, I have found that freebsd-update finds *some* chance to lose the linker and run into a long string of "cp: invalid argument" shooting itself in the foot.  I've had this happen.  If I were clever, I might keep a copy of base.txz on the disk beforehand so I could unbreak things.  (It's for this reason that I put in a bug that put ssh/scp into /rescue, where there's no copy of ftp.)

Also, if I were going to go this way, I would grab the freebsd-update script from a *modern* system, there are bugs in it that were fixed, that were present in your version.

Note well that I say what *I* might do in this case, not what you *should* do.

Hope this helps, or at least lends some perspective.

-Dan