SysAdmins' Chronicles

In FreeBSD 6.2, you could add the polling option in /etc/rc.conf for a given interface or specify it manually when using ifconfig. This enabled device polling if you enabled it when recompiling your kernel. In FreeBSD 6.3 polling is no longer an option for ifconfig. So, make sure it is not specified in /etc/rc.conf for your network interfaces, otherwise when you restart, your network interfaces will not have an IP address set. Thus, leading to a rather annoying walk over to the server room.

When upgrading from FreeBSD 6.2 to FreeBSD 6.3 with freebsd-update (detailed here) and using a custom built kernel, there is one extra step to be fully upgraded. After you follow the three steps from the instructions and reboot for the second time, you will be unpleasantly surprised to see that you are still using a 6.2 kernel. In fact all you need to do now and go rebuild your customized kernel, install it and reboot. Now you will have a customized 6.3 kernel installed.

FreeBSD 6.3 was released early this morning. The official announcement can be found here: http://www.FreeBSD.org/releases/6.3R/announce.html

Highlights from the announcement

• KDE updated to 3.5.8, GNOME updated to 2.20.1, Xorg updated to 7.3

• BIND updated to 9.3.4

• sendmail updated to 8.14.2

• lagg(4) driver ported from OpenBSD/NetBSD

• unionfs file system re-implemented

• freebsd-update(8) now supports an upgrade command

The last feature I'd like to comment on. Essentially what freebsd-update can now do is upgrade releases. In other words you can now upgrade a FreeBSD 6.3 system to FreeBSD 6.4. To upgrade 6.2 to 6.3 via this method look further down on the announcement linked above. After I have gone through this process, I'll make another post with my experiences, and full instructions.

[Update]
Instructions on doing an update from FreeBSD 6.x to FreeBSD 7:
FreeBSD major version upgrades
Instructions on doing a minor update From FreeBSD 6.x to FreeBSD 6.3:
FreeBSD minor version upgrades

One complaint I’ve always had about FreeBSD port’s tree is upgrading outdated installed ports. Typically you need to go by hand and uninstall all the dependancies of a port, upgrade the port, and then reinstall all the dependancies. However, there are a few solutions for port upgrade management. The one I like the best is portupgrade that is available in the ports tree under /usr/ports/sysutils/portupgrade.

I have three typical usages:

Upgrade all ports, recursively reinstall any dependancies, and install any build dependancies

portupgrade -arR

Upgrade all ports, but ignore dependancies

portupgrade -a

Upgrade a single port, recursively reinstall any dependancies, install any build dependancies

portupgrade -rR <portname>

In FreeBSD 6.2 and later, the freebsd-update command allows you to update binaries of your base operating system.

It has four commands:

fetch - Inspects current system and downloads available needed updates.

install - After a fetch is run, this installs the downloaded updates.

rollback - Rollback the most recent update.

cron - Sleeps a random amount of time from 1 second to an hour, inspects the current system and downloads the available needed updates. If you have set an email address in the configuration file /etc/freebsd-update.conf it will email you with a list of needed updates (by default this email it sent to root locally). As its name depicts this is ideal for running freebsd-update in cron.

Resources:
man 8 freebsd-update
man 5 freebsd-update.conf