Mother was running OpenBSD 3.3, which is now over two years old. Over the last couple of weeks I installed the latest shining OpenBSD 3.6 and all of the necessary software onto a HD, and on Saturday I swapped it into mother and migrated the data over to the new system.
I expected to spend only a few hours top at the data centre, but it turned out that I spent over 8 hours there. With the system almost working and I was ready to go home, I decided that it would be a good idea to duplicate the boot partition onto the not-yet-sync’ed HD, but that for some reasons gave me kernel panics and the system refused to boot up anymore. Disconnecting the 2nd HD solved the problem, so did configuring the 2nd HD and the DVD reader to use Cable Select on the IDE bus. Then I realized that, with the old and new RAID components on the same system, mother would prompt for manual selection of the root component and couldn’t otherwise boot automatically into a servicing state allowing remote administration. I also wasn’t comfortable doing the RAID reorganization remotely—-turned out that it was a good thing I did it onsite, as the RAID control software was crashing the kernel into the kernel debugger all over the place, needing hard reboots from the console. It took a bit over two hours to rebuild the software RAID (reconstruct data and then reconstruct parity, the latter I never understands why, as it’s RAID1 mirroring and no parity calculation is really necessary), but it was worth it, ‘cos I won’t have to go back to work on mother at the data centre for quite some time (althou one of the less-important fans in the front is starting to act up, and will need to be replaced in due course, but this is not urgent).
Switched POP3/IMAP server software from Courier IMAP to Dovecot, which should be much faster. Minor glitches with existing folders disappearing from the email clients, but under Thunderbird it’s just a matter of re-subscribing those folders. No big deal. Also lost MD5-challenge-response feature, but we could just use POP3/IMAP over SSL instead.
James also helped me out with testing Sendmail over TLS/SSL. Finally got it all working just earlier in the evening.
I’ll probably setup a Wiki for the upgrade/update notes.