Painless FreeBSD upgrade (6.2 to 6.3)

Just follow the steps below to upgrade to FreeBSD 6.3 (taken from the FreeBSD 6.3 release notes). Earlier in this blog I wrote about upgrading my Dell Inspiron 3500 laptop and my wiki server from FreeBSD 6.1 to 6.2. This was a painless process thanks to the fine folks at FreeBSD. Well, now that 6.3 is out, the upgrade to 6.3 was even easier.

FreeBSD Update

Starting with FreeBSD 6.3, the freebsd-update(8) utility supports binary upgrades of i386 and amd64 systems systems running earlier FreeBSD releases, release candidates, and betas. Users upgrading to FreeBSD 6.3 from older releases (in particular, older than 6.3-RC1) will need to download an updated version of freebsd-update(8) that supports upgrading to a new release.

# fetch http://people.freebsd.org/~cperciva/freebsd-update-upgrade.tgz

Downloading and verifying the digital signature for the tarball (signed by the FreeBSD Security Officer's PGP key) is highly recommended.

# fetch http://people.freebsd.org/~cperciva/freebsd-update-upgrade.tgz.asc

# gpg --verify freebsd-update-upgrade.tgz.asc freebsd-update-upgrade.tgz

The new freebsd-update(8) can then be extracted and run as follows:

# tar -xf freebsd-update-upgrade.tgz

# sh freebsd-update.sh -f freebsd-update.conf -r 6.3-RELEASE upgrade

# sh freebsd-update.sh -f freebsd-update.conf install

The system must be rebooted with the newly installed kernel before continuing.

# shutdown -r now

Finally, freebsd-update.sh needs to be run one more time to install the new userland components, and the system needs to be rebooted one last time:

# sh freebsd-update.sh -f freebsd-update.conf install

# shutdown -r now

For more information, see:

http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2007-11-10-freebsd-minor-version-upgrade.html