In the spirit of procrastination, I got up the nerve to upgrade my server yesterday. I went from FreeBSD 5.4 to FreeBSD 6.0 (and will soon go up to 6.2 when it’s released), from MySQL 4.1 to 5.0, and PHP 4.4 to PHP 5.2.

The system upgrade was less painful than the MySQL upgrade actually. I followed the excellent instructions at University of Colorado, and it worked flawlessly except for one issue. You know how he mentions the issue with older kernel modules being loaded into the 6.0 kernel? Yeah – I ran unexpectedly into that. I *had* the nvidia-driver port installed, and I looked in /boot/loader.conf to make sure that no others were going to be loaded, and booting into single-user mode isn’t a problem at all. Booting into multi-user is where the problem happened. /usr/local/etc/rc.d/rtc.sh loads the rtc driver – and it’s installed from ports. I just made the rc file non-executable and booted into multi-user just fine, then updated it via portupgrade -f.

The MySQL upgrade was fine on the server, but not so great on the client. I upgraded the client first with portupgrade, then the server. I had portupgrade recompile everything that depended on mysql-client (portupgrade -rRf mysql-client), so I thought I had gotten everything. I then stopped the server, and upgraded the server with portupgrade. Everything went fine until I rebooted for the system upgrade – then PHP stopped working. I recompiled *all* of php, and still no luck. So I figured, what the hell, I’ll upgrade to 5.0. The two things I need PHP for (my weblog and my gallery) would now work with PHP5 (they hadn’t at first), so I upgraded to PHP5. As soon as the php5-mysql extension was installed, everything was working fine. Other PHP extensions are still being installed as I write this, but the most important ones are there.