Time to upgrade?

Hi Guys. I run a FreeBSD box in a family member's healthcare clinic. We have a local intranet where the users connect to the server via Internet Explorer, and we have a PHP/MYSQL system going for patient records/appointments and so forth. It works great.

However, this is the versions of the stuff I am running on it. I haven't really upgraded it because except for one port that is highly secured, the server is not able to be accessed from outside the LAN. So, there isn't really any security risks. However, we are in the 'off-season', so now is the time for upgrades and so forth. Any tips or anything I should really do?? Thanks!

FreeBSD: 4.8-STABLE (April 4, 2003)
PHP: 4.3.1
Apache: 1.3.27
MySQL: 3.23.56

you know what they say about a running system. If it ain't broke...
And you specifically used "great", and not just 'running' to describe yours. Personally I would just read through the security advisories and see if any pertain to your particular situation (many of the will not). I think SSL underwent a few changes in the last year. Might want to check the apache and php security as well.
I was running the same setup 'til just recently, but without any important applications that might make me more hesitant to upgrade. I do recall ruby causing problems during the updates. There is a bit of a trick to go from 1.6 to 1.8. due to dependencies. I think I just brute forced it, so maybe someone else should explain the elegant way to cross that bridge. (I'd be interested to hear that as well )

Of course it is terribly tempting to do a complete upgrade (build and install world and kernel) , expecially considering the nearly legendary reliablility of FreeBSD and it's ports system. I am now fully RELENG_4 upgraded, (I explained some of it in a parallel thread just a few hours ago) and the system appears to be ok. I still have to do a lot more testing though before I use the term "rock solid". The update was fairly straightforward, and the documentation covers it well. I don't remember running into situations that weren't covered in the documentation. Oops, yes there was one situation: I had portupgraded perl to version 5.8.2. That is in the other thread as well. Build world worked, but the kernel needed to use the old version of perl to build. I installed the package in /usr/src and then everything was groovy.

Hi Steven,

I know exactly how you feel. The server is performing awesome (most likely due to the light load), and has not crashed once yet. I typically restart it every 30 or 40 days though, just to keep it running good.

But it is tempting to upgrade!

The only thing I worry about is if it crashes one day because I didn't upgrade. Is that likely to happen, or is it rare?

Personally, I believe the easiest way (and one of FreeBSD's great boons) to keep applications up to date is with the ports collection. Did you install your applications from the ports or from sources? Is the ports tree installed (can be done quite easily in /stand/sysinstall)?

Are you are familiar with the terms cvsup, portupgrade, portversion, pkg_install/deinstall/version/info? If not, I suggest reading a bit about those first, either in the man pages or the handbook (or at www.freebsddiary.org, which I found quite helpful regarding the use of the ports tree. The articles are kept fairly simple and short, which makes it easier to get started).

The following covers CVS.

http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.IS...tting-edge.html

Keeping the system itself up to date is equally simple, if somewhat different. To get to goods on that, read (at least) the subchapter "make world" in the link above.

I just did the make world this morning, and posted some of the more interesting bits on a parallel thread: http://forums.devshed.com/t153818/s.html. Scorpions4ever had some great tips and got me on the right track. Before this, I had only done kernel compilations because I feared a make call as complex as "buildworld" would likely have bugs somewhere in it. But it seems to in fact perform flawlessly.