How easy/hard are updates/upgrades?

[Christoph Harder]

Hello Seann, Hello Balázs,

thank you for your fast feedback and the links.

Having a separate non-critical machine for building and testing would indeed make sense and avoid many potential problems.
Is it important to build on the same hardware or will the build process always produce the same results independent of the hardware it is running?
E.g. could I use a server to build the binaries and then sync them with some embedded system (with a processor that probaby doesn't support the latest SSE, AVX, ...)?

Best regards,
Christoph


Am 22.01.2023 um 07:46 schrieb Seann Aswell:
> I too have had 'freebsd-update fetch upgrade' result in issues, so while FreeBSD's binary update process is easy, it isn't bulletproof.
> 
> I personally don't recall ever having an issue with DragonFly's source updating process, but keep in mind that compiling source is required, so on resource constrained systems it can take quite a while.
> 
> Having been responsible for supporting various systems remotely in the past, your concern is completely understandable. Once you go thru the process a few times, you will gain confidence in updating remotely, as long as you have a backup snapshot of the OS and someone is onsite in case there are issues.
> 
> FYI- A few resources about updating constrained systems:
> https://marc.info/?l=dragonfly-users&m=149234716521744&w=2
> https://umbriel.fr/blog/Upgrading_DragonFly_BSD_hosts_with_a_central_build_server.html
> 
> The other advantage of updating from a central source is that you can test with a non-critical machine, and be pretty confident it will work on others.
> 
> 
> On 1/21/23 12:30, Christoph Harder wrote:
>> Hello everybody,
>>
>> maybe this question should be extended with "How bulletproof are updates/upgrades?".
>>
>> I've used FreeBSD as OS for three VPN gateways, but keeping the systems up to date was always a problem.
>> Multiple times manual conflict resolution was required. Sometimes remote access to the systems failed while/after an update, causing downtimes and requiring me to go to the systems.
>> Now this might not be a FreeBSD problem, I'm certainly no expert.
>> Anyway, the result was, that I generally only did updates when I was near the systems and did updates not as often as I would have liked.
>> I did the updates by myself, since anytime a manual conflict resolution would be required none of the other users could do it. Ideally updates/upgrades would be so easy that anybody can do it or that they can be automated.
>>
>> Now to the actual question. How easy/hard/bulletproof are DragonflyBSD updates/upgrades?
>>
>> https://www.dragonflybsd.org/docs/handbook/Upgrading/ looks super easy, but so did the update/upgrade manual of FreeBSD.
>>
>> Is the upgrade process on Dragonfly BSD easy enough that you could describe the process to a (non-technical) user over the phone?
>>
>> Best regards,
>> Christoph Harder
> 
> 
> 
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