[j-nsp] Upgrading from 7.1 to ?

[Richard A Steenbergen]

On Wed, Jan 02, 2008 at 09:47:54PM -0700, David Ball wrote:
> if you're going to go all the way to 8.5, I'd recommend making your
> way to 8.4R2.4 first, THEN going to 8.5R1.14 if your hardware can
> handle it.  8.5 involves a significant upgrade in the underlying
> FreeBSD operating system (see release notes again) and partition
> layout, and 8.4 to 8.5R1.14 is your best bet if you're going to go
> that far.  I ran into issues on T-series when trying to go from 8.2 to
> 8.5.

I don't know if there are any partition changes this time around, but 
there are certainly a lot of kernel and library changes in the inherited 
FreeBSD code. That should really be taken care of by the jinstall though, 
which is required when changing between 8.5 and earlier versions.

Normally you would use jbundle when doing incremental upgrades, which just 
swaps out the md vnode-backed images comprising JUNOS, thus magically and 
almost atomically "replacing" all of the files on a running system (and 
allowing for a single reboot to upgrade). This normally works fine, you 
don't even have to immediately restart the daemons, but the major changes 
in 8.5 (like say, the new libc) would completely break all of the 
dynamically linked programs still running.

The solution is to require jinstall, which is just the jbundle image plus 
a small installer image. When you reboot after adding the jinstall the 
installer image boots the next time around, does a newfs and any necessary 
repartitioning of the disks (after first saving a copy of important things 
like your router configuration in memory :P), then does a regular jbundle 
install onto the newly "fresh" system and finally reboots a second time. 
Because you're newfs'ing from an installer image running entirely in 
memory, there should be no issues with partition or libraries changes.

Thats not to say that it isn't possible there is some other bug (I've run 
into many of them on the install scripts which take care of the internal 
changes between versions, config validation, etc), but at least it's not 
really an issue of partition changes.

-- 
Richard A Steenbergen <ras at e-gerbil.net>       http://www.e-gerbil.net/ras
GPG Key ID: 0xF8B12CBC (7535 7F59 8204 ED1F CC1C 53AF 4C41 5ECA F8B1 2CBC)