FreeBSD 6.4 EoL
As of yesterday, FreeBSD 6.4, and with it the entire 6.x branch, has
reached its End-of-Life. It's time to upgrade (or maybe upgrayedd, for a
double dose of something-or-other).
So herein lies the problems. Months (years?) ago, I attempted to upgrade
tak to FreeBSD 7.2. I plugged in a SATA disk into my workstation,
installed the OS, reconfigured all the daemons, services, and
functionalities tak has running, copied over a snapshot of all the data,
and then edited the fstab to match the device names as they'd exist on
tak.
I removed the IDE root disk and installed the new SATA disk and tak and
watched the kernel fail to find the root disk. Or the other SATA disk in
tak.
Based on the bug reports in the FreeBSD Gnats system, and various
conversations in the mailing list, it seems Asus, who made the
motherboard in tak, used a slightly non-standard SATA implementation on
this particular board. Between the 6.x and 7.x line, some work had been
done on the SATA drivers in FreeBSD and mad them more
standards-compliant (a good thing). This, however, broke SATA on this
Asus board.
Tak is about 6 years old now, and other than some over heating issues,
serves its purpose well. So do upgrade to FreeBSD 8.x on an IDE disk and
replace the other SATA disk with another ATA disk, or do I build a new,
lower-power, higher-performance system?
If anyone actually reads this, feel free to use the new comments feature
to give me feedback. I think it's working.
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