20.7.8 UPgrade path - Risks

[sparticle]

Hello,

We are running a fully updated 20.7.8 system. Is there is guide to upgrading safely from 20.7.8 to the latest 21.7?

Cheers
Spart

[franco]

Hi there,

Release notes for 20.7, 21.1 and 21.7 mention incompatibilities, but we try to avoid major spoilers as much as possible. ;)

Since 20.1 to current changes the HardenedBSD/FreeBSD base code to 12.1 make sure to prep for possible hardware incompatibilities / driver issues. This mostly applies to the initial 20.7 upgrade and afterwards 21.1 and 21.7 should be much less of a risk in theory.


Cheers,
Franco

[sparticle]

@franco

Thanks for the reply. We are running 20.7.8 and it is stable for a while now.

Is the recommendation to simply unlock the upgrade from the UI and follow along or upgrade from the console?

Are there any gotchas that you are aware of with 1 Lan connection and 1 WAN PPPoE VDSL connection using these drivers:

Code Select Expand

/home/admin # pciconf -lv | grep -A1 -B3 network
bce0@pci0:1:0:0: class=0x020000 card=0x7059103c chip=0x163914e4 rev=0x20 hdr=0x00
    vendor     = 'Broadcom Inc. and subsidiaries'
    device     = 'NetXtreme II BCM5709 Gigabit Ethernet'
    class      = network
    subclass   = ethernet
bce1@pci0:1:0:1: class=0x020000 card=0x7059103c chip=0x163914e4 rev=0x20 hdr=0x00
    vendor     = 'Broadcom Inc. and subsidiaries'
    device     = 'NetXtreme II BCM5709 Gigabit Ethernet'
    class      = network
    subclass   = ethernet


It's a 2 port HP card one side Lan the other Wan.

Cheers
Spart

[franco]

Sorry i misread this earlier today as 20.1. That's even better. :)

bce looks safe.

We recommend to be able to get to the console quickly if required, but it's not a must have when triggering the update. Depending on disk and boot speed the whole procedure can be over in a few minutes or last up to 1 hour. Latter part is where you could always switch to console to see what's up that way.


Cheers,
Franco

[sparticle]

Yeah not going according to plan. It's been supposedly upgrading for the last 5 hours or so. Just get a little dot to show progress but I think it's lying.

I can easily get to the console as I am trialing the upgrade on a backup of the live router in a VM.

Is there a way I can see what it's actually doing. Top does not show anything useful that I can see.

By now I would have thought it would have finished or crashed or something.

Cheers
Spart

[franco]

You mean it's still fetching the update? Could be anything from slow connection to defunct IPv6 or otherwise...

You can kill the fetch from the console and try again:

# killall fetch


Cheers,
Franco