Changing architecture

[Trond Endrestøl]

On Tue, 23 Feb 2016 11:39+0100, Luciano Mannucci wrote:

> 
> Hello all!
> 
> I have an i386 small server that I whish to upgrade to amd64 (upgrading
> the hardware too:) without destroying user files and configurations.
> Is that possible? It might be interesting on some virtual machines too...
> Maybe doing a rebuild of everything in /usr/src changing the architecture
> is enough?

If you're really brave, you could carefully extract an amd64 system on 
top of your i386 system. You need to exclude a few directories for 
each of kernel.txz and base.txz, such as /boot, /etc, /root, and /var. 
Add lib32.txz to the mix. Having ports-mgmt/portmaster around helps 
rebuilding all your ports with ease.

I did such a stunt a year ago, just to prove it's possible.

As always, have good backups, in plural, just in case something goes 
wrong. It's devastating losing 1 TiB of precious data.

http://ximalas.info/2015/01/17/migrating-freebsd-from-i386-to-amd64/

-- 
+-------------------------------+------------------------------------+
| Vennlig hilsen,               | Best regards,                      |
| Trond Endrestøl,              | Trond Endrestøl,                   |
| IT-ansvarlig,                 | System administrator,              |
| Fagskolen Innlandet,          | Gjøvik Technical College, Norway,  |
| tlf. mob.   952 62 567,       | Cellular...: +47 952 62 567,       |
| sentralbord 61 14 54 00.      | Switchboard: +47 61 14 54 00.      |
+-------------------------------+------------------------------------+