Re: upgrading an old system

[steve%prd.co.uk@localhost (Steve Blinkhorn)]

My memory us that whne booting an installation floppy the first stages involve setting up an MFS
and proceeding to the resst of the installation over FTP, NFS or whatever.  Is there not a way of
setting up this MFS from the existing file system?   I seem to remember warnings not to power
cycle before a certain stage had been reached.

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

You wrote:
> 
> => 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>
> =>
> =>
> 
> 
>