NeoPhi Upgrade 2
Most of this weekend was spent upgrading NeoPhi to OpenBSD 4.0. I figured since I was going to patch my machine for the timezone fix I might as well just patch everything. Just as last time I did the less recommended upgrading without install media approach. It really isn't that bad. While I did learn a few tricks from the last time, I managed to make some other ones...
First I forgot one of the userland packages. I guess at some point I added xbase to the set of userland packages I had installed. Thankfully the problem only played out when one of the optional packages failed to upgrade due to a missing dependency. Thankfully I found a post that spoke to the issue, installed both revs of it and things started working again. Guess I just need to keep better track of what I have installed.
I again had postfix upgrade issues. Thankfully this time I had shutoff incoming requests at the firewall so no messages were put into limbo. The problem was during the upgrade of either the userland packages or optional packages the preferred mail server gets reset. As a result you need to rerun the postfix-enable script.
Mailman didn't upgrade properly and I also forgot to test it post upgrade. As a result this generated some bounced messages. I finally tracked it down to a combination of a configuration and permission/ownership issue which means I should be fine for future upgrades. I added an update in my previous upgrade post as that includes the error message and other details.
I have to say the new package update scheme rocks. Using both PKG_PATH and PKG_CACHE I was able to simulate what I'd previously done manually. One problem is the pair.com OpenBSD mirror doesn't play well with pkg_add. I had to switch to another mirror to actually get it to work. I thought I was being cleaver and teeing the output of the pkg_add command. Alas it uses some funky screen redraws and my output file contained almost no useful information. This is kind of bad since unless you are paying attention there is some information that scrolls by that you would otherwise miss. Next time I'll have to look at other switches to pkg_add to maybe change its behavior Probably another reason to do a fresh install.
Once everything was updated I applied the most recent patches based on the errata list. For some reason though I didn't think to reboot. As a result running applications didn't pickup the new timezone information, which was the main reason I went through the entire exercise to begin with...
During the course of the many reboots I also checked in on my RAID disks. Turns out I don't think they have ever been doing the right thing! While OpenBSD does support 3Ware, the drivers don't do everything that a 3Ware setup really needs to do. There is some funky RAID Array rebuilding operation (which my disks are currently in) that has to be initiated by the driver. 3Ware has never supplied the OpenBSD developers with the needed documentation to add this support into the driver. So, should your machine ever experience a power outage you'll need to reboot into some other OS which 3Ware completely supports in order to actually get your RAID Array working again. Ludicrous!