So yesterday I decided to make my home fileserver a guinea pig and upgraded from 5.2.1-p9 to 5.3-beta3. I'm pretty thrilled because I haven't really been able to do regular source upgrades since moving from 4.x to 5.x....sadly I don't have the time to stick with CURRENT, so this is my first look at a lot of new features.

At any rate...I just thought I'd share a couple things I ran into. It's important to note that nothing was out of the ordinary in this upgrade process. I've just noticed when I do upgrades on a regular basis, I tend to get in the habit of flying through things. Especially with mergemaster, in general there are certain files that usually do not change. So if you're anything like me, you may find this useful.

Right off the bat, there are two new system user accounts and three new groups. The two new user accounts and their groups are proxy and _pflogd. The third group is authpf. Check out UPDATING to see what they are for. It's easy to guess by the name pflogd that some changes to syslog can be expected. Both syslogd.conf and newsyslog.conf have changes that you will have to add or let mergemaster deal with. The two new user accounts will also need to be added to your mail aliases.

The build/install world process went flawless. Afterwards I took a look at the GENERIC kernel config. If you use a custom kernel you will want to do the same. This is the first time since switching to 5.x that I've had to change my config. SCHED_ULE is now the default scheduler. GEOM_GPT and ADAPTIVE_GIANT have been added to GENERIC. You may want to take a look through NOTES at some of the other GEOM options. Maybe give updating and freebsd.org a read and learn about the geom classes.

The biggest problem I ran into is one that is likely to stick around until after the freeze on the ports tree is lifted. If you track current, you have no doubt seen people complaining about portupgrade being broken. Fortunately somebody has replied with a simple fix.

Finally, I don't know if this problem is related to the build procedure or not. Source upgrades should not affect anything in /boot as far as I am aware, however somehow my /boot/defaults/loader.conf got changed around a bit. The default path for kernel modules was changed, preventing any modules from being loaded during the default boot procedure. It was a simple fix but getting to the bottom of the problem took a few hours and a couple kernel rebuilds.

So far the system is running good under normal use conditions. I've done a few large archives that ran the cpu up to 80% for about 15 minutes with no crashes. Once I got through the boot problem described above I was able to get linux compatability running again and setup an enemy territory server with no problems. I have not had a chance to do networking benchmarks, I am very interested in knowing if any of you guys have done so.

Hardware wise my file server is nearly identicle to my 2.8 at SM. The only major difference is a 3ware sata raid card with 3 250GB WD drives.