safest way to upgrade a production server

[John Almberg]

>> Anyway, I guess what I should do is patch this to the latest 6.3
>> version?
>>
>
> My strategy was to do a source-base upgrade to 6.3-RELEASE, and then
> use freebsd-update to apply critical patches. Freebsd-update only
> works on -RELEASE versions with generic kernels, but I find it much
> faster and easier than trying to do upgrades from source. You also
> need to keep track of ports that need updating: use portaudit for
> that.

Unfortunately, this sounds about right, to me.

Well, I'm going to have to practice long and hard before trying this  
on our production machines... I need to get a feeling for just how  
dangerous a process this is, before trying it. It's one of those  
things you want to do right the first time!

-- John