In message <200410261443.57167.ianzag@megasignal.com>, Ian Zagorskih writes:
>On Tuesday 26 October 2004 14:30, Patrick Walsh wrote:
>
>> I'd like to upgrade to the latest and greatest NetBSD now in
>> anticipation of the final release.  The install documentation suggests
>> that I need to have boot floppies or a bootable cd-rom to do this.
>> Unfortunately I need to do this from a remote location.  Even if I
>> were at the computer, it has no floppy or cd-rom drives and I'd like
>> to avoid the messiness of removing the server from the rack and
>> attaching a drive.
>>
>> So... can I upgrade from 1.6 to 2.0 without using removable media?
>> I've grabbed the files in
>> ftp.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD-daily/netbsd-2-0/200410100000/i386/binary/,
>> but am hesitating to try anything.
>>
>> If it is possible to do what I want to do, what steps should I take?
>
>First of all, get 2.0 GENERIC kernel and install it instead of your current 
>kernel (copy it to /netbsd). And reboot. If you'r lucky and all is fine 
>you'll get 2.0 kernel and 1.6. userland. From my experience on i368, 
>2.x/-current kernels work just fine with older userlands like 1.6.1 or 1.6.2.

I upgraded a remote server from 1.6.2 to 2.0beta with no trouble and no 
surprises, using exactly this mechanism.
>
>Of course do not forget to make a backup copy of your current 1.6 kernel in 
>root like cp /netbsd /onetbsd. So you can bring up manually old kernel of 
>smth goes wrong.
>

Right.  And have some way to power-cycle the machine or press the reset 
button.

		--Steve Bellovin, http://www.research.att.com/~smb