On Sat, 26 Feb 2000, gabriel rosenkoetter wrote:

> It looks mighty tempting, and I'm about to try it on my 7500, but I
> want to check a few things first.
> 
> My plan as it stands is this:
> 
> 1) Boot from the current boot.fs.
> 
> 2) Select Upgrade (as opposed to Install or Shell).
> 
> 3) Install all the packages from the sets (which I have on the local
> hard drive already) EXCEPT kern.tgz and etc.tgz.

Why not kern.tgz? In general you should always have a kernel as current as
your userland.

As time goes by, new syscalls get added, and libc (and other libraries and
programs) get updated to use them. If you have a libc and/or programs
written for syscalls your kernel lacks, you will have a lot of core
dumping. Some times it doesn't matter much, sometimes even init won't
work (i.e. you won't boot). :-)

> 4) Reboot and have the machine behave.
> 
> Some questions...
> 
> 0) Would I be better advised to do a dump of my entire drive to the
> (copious) free space on the Sun clients in cs.swarthmore.edu?
> 
> (I can get away with it - there's space and I administrate them
> anyway.)

Probably not a bad idea.

> 1) Is there an OF upgrade from Apple that will work with the 7500?
> 
> (I think I have OF 1.x.5 where x might be 0, but I'm working from
> memory.)

Not really, other than possibly ripping the OF out of another 7500. It's
only recently that OF has been made upgradable. :-)

> 3) I'm currently running kernel version 1.4P, which I compiled from
> the sources and installed without upgrading kmem and gcc as I should
> have, which I later did by hand. In fact, I'm going the snapshot route
> so that I can stop having one foot in 1.4.1 and one in -current. I
> have a moderate amount of custom stuff in my kernel setup (including a
> BUFPAGES setting for my 192 MBs of RAM and some pinnings of drives to
> sd? numbers).
> 
> Can I continue using this kernel with the 20000205 snapshot?

As above, not recomended. You might be able to get away with it, you might
not.

> Should I build a new kernel with my configuration before doing the
> installation and move it to /netbsd while on the boot floppy?

That would be the best. :-)

> Or do I *really* have to install kern.tgz because it includes more
> than just a kernel?

It's just the kernel.

> I'm well aware that the binary distribution won't write over things
> like /usr/local, /home, and /chroot (which contains BIND, postfix, and
> a couple of other daemons I don't really trust), but can someone else
> say so so that I feel better?

I think you're fine on this one. I think the most that might happen is
that the upgrade might run mtree to fix up the permissions on some files &
directories. But that will only happen on directories NetBSD ships.
/chroot shouldn't be touched.

> 4) Anything I'm missing towards this goal?

You mentioned MAKEDEV in another message. It's in etc.tgz. I usually untar
it somewhere off to the side, and manually merge. :-)

Take care,

Bill