I just completed the upgrade to OpenBSD 3.9 for my erdelynet.com web and mail server. Besides the obvious OpenBSD 3.9 upgrade goodness, many of the applications and servers that I run were upgraded with it.
It’s amazing that with each upgrade/re-install I do, how much easier it gets. But, I still run into problems along the way.
I’ve been waiting to upgrade my server until packaging of PHP 5.1.4 was integrated into the tree. Unfortunately it was integrated into the -current ports tree (which is kind of “beta code”). Fortunately, not much has changed in the ports tree from 3.9 to -current. So, just downloading the php-5.1.4 CVS code into the 3.9 ports tree worked and the packages built without any issues. Along with this version of PHP, a hardened flavor has been introduced [hardened-php].
Prior to installing, I wrote a script to automatically install the packages I wanted to install to work out dependency issues (like a few X libs for GD). Once I had my “port_install” script ready, it was go-time.
My installation process involved running mergemaster on copies of my etc and var directories beforehand (to minimize downtime). Then, I did a clean install, blowing away /, /tmp, /var and /usr while preserving /home (many of the traditional /var directories like mysql, named and some spool directories live on /home and are symlinked to /var). I copied my upgraded etc and pieces of var in place. Then I made the symlinks in /var to their respective directories in /home. After that, pretty much everything came up on its own.
EXCEPT: I forgot a few files for spamd (OpenBSD’s, not SpamAssassin) in /var/db. D’oh! During the first boot, pf failed because it couldn’t find some files to load some tables. But, I had backed /var up, so I just copied those files over.
The only other hiccup I had was with the new MySQL (5.0.21). I had to upgrade some tables before my old data would work with the new server. I kind of anticipated that, but forgot in the moment, so was caught a little off guard.
But, now my server is up and running:
- Stock Apache, chrooted, with PHP-5.1.4 (hardened)
- Stock Sendmail with SASL
- Courier IMAP with POP3
- ClamAV for anti-virus
- OpenBSD’s spamd tarpit with greylisting
- SpamAssassin
- Hypermail for ssh-l archives
- mlmmj for ssh-l mailing list