How easy/hard are updates/upgrades?

[Jávorszky Balázs]

Hi,

My guess is that same hardware is the best option. Most of the upgrade 
related problems here in the list look to me hardware (driver) related.

Regards,

Balázs

On 1/22/23 08:34, Christoph Harder wrote:
> 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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