how to upgrade from NetBSD 3.1 to 4 ?

[Philip]

I read the documentation on the netbsd.org site and only suggests one upgrade method, that is to
boot from a NetBSD 4 CD and upgrade that way.
The problem is that my broadband firewall / web server / mail server is running NetBSD 3.1 and has
no keyboard, no monitor, and no CDROM drive. It lives in the cupboard under my stairs. I only access
it using ssh.
Is there no other way? like put a netbsd 4 kernel on the drive and reboot it or something
Booting from CD is going to cause quite a lot of hassle.

thanks for any help, Philip

[Gary Thorpe]

--- Philip <su...@christiantena.net> wrote:

Well, I remember seeing something in the installation guides about
putting the installer files on unused partitions or on NFS. Looking at
http://www.netbsd.org/docs/guide/en/chap-exinst.html#exinst-choose-media,
it says you can put the installation files in these places as well as
HTTP, local directory, etc. but I honestly have not tried these
methods.

However, all you would need to do once you have such a location set up
is boot the INSTALL kernel (from the hard disk presumably or maybe even
netboot). So your options appear to be: FTP, HTTP, NFS, unmounted
partition, local directory. The first 3 depend on the INSTALL kernel
being able to set up your NIC/network successfully to some degree. The
last two would require you being careful not to erase the installation
tar archives (e.g. an unmounted partition not in use, a local directory
on a file system you don't plan to newfs/erase/reuse).

Hope that was helpful.

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[Jan Danielsson]

I upgraded our development server (from 3.0 to 3.1) via ssh (the
computer was physically more than 150 km away from where I was).

I upgraded by building NetBSD 3 myself, and upgraded using build.sh.

Sure, I was nervous as hell, but it worked. :)

--
Kind regards,
Jan Danielsson

[Greg Troxel]

I remotely update machines pretty often. My script to do the upgrade is
in INSTALL-NetBSD in the sysutils/etcmanage package. Note that it
doesn't update boot blocks, but usually one doesn't need to do that
(patches to optionally update boot blocks are welcome).

[Lars Friend]

One thing you'll want to read up on before taking this on
(since you mentioned that this is also your mail server) is
PostFix. The default mail server on NetBSD 3.x is Sendmail, and 4.0
uses PostFix, which while a lot saner to configure and generally more
trim and fit, it is configured very differently, so you may want to
have all of your ducks in a row regarding that before you start your
upgrade and either be prepared to swim upstream and keep using
sendmail, or have a pretty good idea of what you'll need to do to
postfix to make it behave as your sendmail used to.

-lars

[Mark Weinem]

1) Make a backup
2) Fetch a new kernel and the binary sets and store them /some/where/
3) Install the new kernel (but keep the old one!!)

# mv /netbsd /netbsd.old
# pax -zrf /some/where/newkernel.tgz
# mv /some/where/newkernel /netbsd

4) Reboot

5) Install the sets *except* etc.tzg and xetc.tgz!!

# cd /
# pax -zrf /some/where/set.tgz
# ...
# ...

6) Run etcupdate to merge important changes:

# cd /
# etcupdate -s /some/where/etc.tgz -s /some/where/xetc.tgz

7) Upgrade finished, time to reboot.

Best regards, Mark

--
Mark Weinem
Jabber: wei...@jabber.cz

[Jeremy C. Reed]

On Tue, 4 Mar 2008, Mark Weinem wrote:

> 5) Install the sets *except* etc.tzg and xetc.tgz!!
>
> # cd /
> # pax -zrf /some/where/set.tgz

Maybe add -pe

So you don't lose special modes, ownerships.

[Philip]

That bit is easy because I am already running Postfix on the 3.1 server.
Also the server has four partitions with user content on different partitions to the OS.

thanks, Philip