OS Upgrades – OpenBSD 5.0 coming soon!
It’s been a few months since our last round of OpenBSD upgrades, and one or two servers are slightly overdue. For starters, the shell/ftp server login.geekisp.com is still on OpenBSD 4.7, so getting that up to 5.0 is at the top of the list. As always with OpenBSD upgrades, I expect things to go extremely smoothly, but whether or not we’ll see a significant change in performance is always difficult to judge. There’s no doubt been a slew of performance improvements in the various OpenBSD subsystems, but exactly whether they’ll bring real benefits for our usage patterns is anyone’s guess. I keep hoping for major NFS improvements, but on that one I may have a better shot playing the lotto every week and then hoping to make enough money to pay the developers to make it happen.
Fortunately performance regressions are extremely rare with the OpenBSD crew, so my money is on things getting faster.
The timing on this one will be tricky since the selection of installed ports represents a nontrivial amount of work to ensure compatibility. I already know that this upgrade assumes I want to upgrade ‘Trac’ (which I do, just, it’s complicated with all the dependent plugins), but what else… I’m not sure yet. I don’t expect any other major curveballs, but with a large number of installed packages it is difficult to test every use case that’s supported.
Keep your eyes peeled for more info on this – if I can get these upgrades done in the next few weeks, I’ll be really happy.