Re: 3.x end of life

["Michael L. Hitch" <mhitch%lightning.msu.montana.edu@localhost>]

On Mon, 1 Jun 2009, Paul Mather wrote:

> 2) The NetBSD install on this machine dates back quite some way (to some 1.x 
> version; I forget exactly which).  Anyway, it originated in an era where 
> disks were a lot smaller than they are today.  Accordingly, my partitions are 
> smaller than would be common on contemporary sized drives.  I'm worried that 
> if the standard NetBSD 4.x or 5.x install is larger than 3.x that my root 
> partition may not be large enough.  Does anyone know how much 4.x or 5.x 
> differs in size relative to netbsd-3?  Here is what I have currently (which 
> is ample space for 3.x):
>
> Filesystem    Size      Used     Avail Capacity  Mounted on
> /dev/raid0a   126M      44M       75M    37%    /
> /dev/raid2a   126M      55M       65M    45%    /var
> /dev/raid2d   1.5G     957M      514M    65%    /usr
> /dev/raid3a   3.9G     1.5G      2.2G    40%    /home
> /dev/sd1a     1.9G     256M      1.6G    13%    /usr/pkgsrc
> /dev/sd1d     1.9G     1.0G      815M    56%    /usr/src
> /dev/sd3d     2.2G     790M      1.3G    36%    /usr/obj
>
> (I also have a 4.3G drive I can use as a temporary build area.)
>
> As you can see, the system is set up with much of it configured as either 
> RAID-1 or RAID-5 under RAIDframe.  I'd hate to have to re-partition with 
> larger partitions because I'd likely lose that ability given the physical 
> drives in there.  BTW, the system's only production role is as a slave 
> nameserver and so doesn't need much in the way of future expansion: just 
> enough to contain the base OS, really.

  I have certainly run into the problem of having too small of partitions 
to upgrade cleanly :)

  I would guess your partitions may be rather small, depending upon how
many of the sets you have installed.  I haven't used a separate root and
/usr partition for quite some time, so I'm not sure what the split between 
them might be at the moment.

  On my DESTDIR of an alpha 5.0 build, the total size [includes everything 
built for a release] is 572MB, and the /usr portion of that is 535.  /var 
is 604KB.  That looks like it may be able to fit your current partition 
sizes.

> 3) Is it possible to upgrade successfully directly from netbsd-3 to netbsd-5? 
> Or, do you have to upgrade to some version of 4.x as an interim step?  Does 
> anyone have any recommended path they have tried that has been successful? 
> (Right now, it is running netbsd-3.)  I have limited physical access to this 
> system, so I hope not to have to spend much, if any, time in single user mode 
> if I can help it.

  You sould be able to update directly from netbsd-3 to netbsd-5.

  Since you say you have a 4.3G drive you can use as a temporary build 
area, you could make a copy of your /, /usr, and /var partition on it with 
the same size, and grab the 5.0 release distribution sets and untar them 
over those copies.  You would probably want to also try running the 
postinstall script using that copy as the destination directory, which 
will clean out a lot of the obsolete files, to recover some space.  That 
should give you a better idea of a real update might run out of space.

--
Michael L. Hitch                        mhitch%montana.edu@localhost
Computer Consultant
Information Technology Center
Montana State University        Bozeman, MT     USA