On Jan 26, Claude Marinier wrote
> This is addressed to those of you who use NetBSD to do serious work. Here
> we use one as the principal DNS server. It will soon be a DHCP server. It
> may never be a mail server (the rest of DND is going to Exchange and we
> will probably have to follow suit).
> 
> When you upgrade, how do you proceed to minimize down time? Do you build a
> fresh system on a spare box and them swap? Do you use the upgrade option
> of sysinst? if so, how do you handle the modofied files in /etc?
> 
> This is not so much a technical question as a procedural one. I expect to
> be upgrading regularly as new and better versions come out.
> 

If you really know what's you're doing you can do it by hand. Here is
what I used for 1.3.1 ->1.3.2 :
 - build and install a new kernel, reboot
 - extract the binary sets (starting with base). I've done this on a
   machine running multiuser without problems so far (for a mail server
   I would kill sendmail first). 

This is easy for a minor upgrade (1.3.1 -> 1.3.2 or 1.3.2->1.3.3). For
a major (1.3.x->1.4) you're exposed to unexpected problems anyway.
What I would do for a major upgrade would be to install (not upgrade)
NetBSD on another machine, set it up properly. I guess I would take the
opportunity to upgrade other major software, (swich to bind 8, from
sendmail to postfix, etc ...) at the same time, so there's some need to
play with config files.
When it's ready, shut down both machines to single user and copy the remaining
users data (mail spool, www pages, ...) from the old to the new.
Then you have two choise:
  - you swap machines (or just hard disks). It's immediate.
  - you don't want to change hardware. Then use sysinst to erase an repartition
    your old disk, and stop it before it starts extracting sets.
    Then mount the new machine's disk and copy it back to the old (take care
    to not copy /boot, or re-run installboot after!).
    If your user datas are on separate partitions, then you can just
    newfs the system's partitions by hand, you save some time.

--
Manuel Bouyer, LIP6, Universite Paris VI.           Manuel.Bouyer@lip6.fr
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