Re: upgrading an old system

[gary%duzan.org@localhost]

=> I have two servers I have just retrieved from their regular home in a
=> data centre some distance away.  (Less tha opportune interventions by
=> the staff there meant they would not accept remote logins).
=>
=> While I have them here I want to upgrade them to 7.0 (i386).   But one is
=> 2.0, the other 3.0 at present.

   Wow.

=> It looks as though they will not boot from their USB ports, the
=> CD-ROM drives seem not to be DVD-compatible (and I'm  not sure I can
=> find any blank CD-ROM disks).   They have floppy drives, but I'm not
=> sure I have a working floppy drive on a working machine any more.

   I would think CD-ROM would be the way to go. Surely someone in the area
has a stack in the back closet.

=> I have both the machines running normally, and I've backed up everything I
=> need to keep.   Is there a way of upgrading these machines by placing
=> initial installation files on their hard drives, say in a /altboot
=> directory, bootin from there and doing the rest over NFS or FTP?   I
=> have to do an install because I think both machines need new boot
=> blocks to even boot newer releases.   I also need to change the disk
=> layout to add more swap space and create /tmp on disk rather than in an
=> MFS.

   Upgrading via installer from the hard drive was easier up to NetBSD 6,
as you could boot an INSTALL kernel and point it at the sets on your
hard drive as /targetroot. Since NetBSD 7 I've just dumped an install
image on USB flash and booted that. That still wouldn't help
restructuring the partitions, though; you want to boot from alternate
media for that.

=> I am under time pressure because these two machines form the backbone
=> of live 24/7/365 services, now being run on VPSs in their absence.

   This seems exactly the sort of thing you don't want to do under time
pressure.

   Good luck...


                                   Gary Duzan


=> --
=> Steve Blinkhorn <steve%prd.co.uk@localhost>
=>
=>