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At the end of this month, our FreeBSD 8.2 installation will no more be supported by the FreeBSD Security team.

I'd like to use freebsd-update since it looks the more convenient way to update the whole system from FreeBSD 8.2 to FreeBSD 8.3. But I don't have any experiences with freebsd-update.

I already started to read the documentation.


And paying attention especially on this section:

25.2.3 Major and Minor Upgrades

We don't have special stuff on this system, just the usual like Apache, PHP, Subversion, Python, Ruby, etc.

My questions are:

  1. Can I use freebsd-update on a "live" installation like ours?

  2. Do you think that upgrading from 8.2 to 8.3 implicate a lot of downtime beside rebooting the system?

  3. Can you please advice on a general strategy or point me to some resources on the Web.


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1 Answer 1

8.2 to 8.3 should be a very seamless upgrade. There were quite few changes and the ports installed software should work without modification. The time to do the upgrade will depend on your system's speed. You can (and should) do a freebsd-update fetch to get the update files before starting in on the upgrade itself. The freebsd-update install command will install the fetched updates and should take <30 minutes on a modern computer (reboot is required).

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