Someone (name not disclosed as this is potentially to generate trouble for him) has asked me to help upgrade his FreeBSD 4.3 deployment to a “workable” state.

The installation was virgin 4.3-RELEASE. He has added a new ATA hard disk to help the process (the SCSI disk was filled with data and stop to work).

I have downgraded the securelevel (as a mandatory option, this will allow me to add disks and label on it), then sliced the disk and labeled it. After cvs’ing the source code I have rebuilt the kernel to a 4.9-RELEASE-p4. Then I ran into trouble because it seems that cvs has some problem processing with files deleted from -HEAD. Therefore, after a reboot, I have installed cvsup package.

Strangely, because of some changes during 4.3->4.9 days, the box refused to cnnect FTP sites. A workaround is to install it through a HTTP link. Then the system was re-built and I have done mergemaster -i.

All things goes well. The next step was to replace ssh.com’s ssh2 to openssh. This is quite straightforward, but unfortunatelly, he has installed ssh2 in Linux way and hence it’s difficult to remove it completely. The solution was to leave the files as-is and then refresh all ports, then do a find -adate -delete.

I have upgraded the ports tree as well. His applications are written for Zope 2.6.1 and Plone 1.0.4, and he asked me to deploy a Zope 2.7.0 installation with Plone 2.0. After my tests, it seems hard to migrate the installation and I have installed 2.6.2 and 1.0.5 for backward compability as I don’t have time to review all the code and migrate it to 2.0 way.

The whole process costed circa 12 hours to be done. I have left most things untouched, only critical security fixes applied, and all ports are re-registered to make future upgrades easier.

Zope installation is really impressive, I think I will spend some time to do some research on it when I have time.

Well, busy day and busy work today…