update problems

[James Long]

> Date: Wed, 8 Feb 2006 13:25:38 -0500
> From: Chuck Teal <chuck.teal at yahoo.com>
> Subject: Re: update problems
> To: freebsd-questions at freebsd.org
> Message-ID: <200602081325.39122.chuck.teal at yahoo.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain;  charset="iso-8859-1"
> 
> On Wednesday February 8 2006 10:40, Iantcho Vassilev wrote:
> > If you haven`t delete the megremaster store directory(usually /var/....)
> > just rerun it. - mergemaster
> > and ask all the quesions by hand
> >
> > But first i would suggest to find the problem
> >
> > On 2/8/06, zhang <zhhw210095 at gmail.com> wrote:
> > > I've just update to 6.1-PRERELEASE from 6.0. Before I mergemaster -cv ,
> > > the system could work well . But when I mergemaster , I don't check the
> > > differents carefully and choose the " i " option directly most of the
> > > time . Now , all the network programmes can't work , I can't ping
> > > localhost/127.0.0.1 , I can't use " tcpdump " , the c/s kinds like
> > > xserver also go bad ; when the system start , many warnings such as
> > > "...see rc.conf(5)" after dmesg messages.
> > > How can I deal with it ?
> > > Thanks!
> 
> I had a similar problem just yesterday.  Running mergemaster again did not fix 
> the issue.
> 
> In my situation I messed up the /etc/defaults/rc.conf.  It gave me several 
> error messages on boot up similar to yours.  I just copied the rc.conf from 
> the examples directory and replaced the rc.conf in /etc/defaults/rc.conf.  
> Then I did a:
> 
> shutdown now
> exit
> 
> It was working okay when I left this morning.
> 
> I am not sure if this is a good idea or not.  I just know it seems to have 
> solved my problem.  I would keep a backup of the original file somewhere in 
> case you need to revert back to the original.

chuck.teal at yahoo.com's advice is too narrow, IMO.  The best practice I know 
is to back up the entire /etc directory tree before running mergemaster:

...
rm -rf /etc.old
cp -RLp /etc /etc.old
mergemaster -v
...

Then, if something goes wrong in mergemaster, you can just restore the
backup and re-run mergemaster.


Jim