[opus]

Whats the concensus, do I upgrade the server, or rebuild it?

Is SMP default now?

[Strog]

Rebuild. It takes more work jumping through hoops and recompiling everything anyway so you might as well save some time and rebuild.

No. SMP has its own share of issues so it's still optional.

[opus]

So.....seeing my server is a dual cpu, should I pass on this for a wee bit? Or, am I misunderstanding you?

[Strog]

I'm just saying that it's not enabled by default.

[opus]

The only issue I see with rebuilding is not having anywhere to backup everything to. Music, video, things that arent crucial but I certainly dont want to dump them.

But, this is my setup:
[pete@dopey]-->df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Capacity Mounted on
/dev/ad4s1a 252M 47M 185M 20% /
/dev/ad4s1h 92G 22G 63G 26% /server
/dev/ad4s1f 252M 176K 232M 0% /tmp
/dev/ad4s1g 19G 1.5G 16G 8% /usr
/dev/ad4s1e 252M 7.6M 224M 3% /var
procfs 4.0K 4.0K 0B 100% /proc

Of course, '/server' is the one I cant backup. I assume I can install and leave that partition just as it is? I havent done this, I dont believe. Instead of setting the slices 'auto', I can configure tham as I desire...that should work, no?

[Strog]

The installer will see the current partitions but you'll have to assign the mount points again. Just make sure /server isn't flagged for newfs. :Eyecrazy:

[bmw]

Opus, how about simply doing a CD-upgrade to 5.4 RC1 (just out), or wait a few weeks and do that upgrade to 5.4 Release? I find that the CD Upgrade does a great job.

What kind of h/w is your 2-CPU box? FreeBSD 5.x SMP kicks butt. If your h/w is supported, it will work well.

(Word to the wise: avoid (disable) ACPI. It might work OK, but then again it may just behave randomly every now and then. :-)

[tmh]

I'm running FreeBSD 5.3-p5 with SMP enabled at work. Works pretty well, much less flakey than previous versions. It spontaneously rebooted the other day, not sure why. One thing I do is logout every day. If I stayed logged in to X for multiple days, the stability decreases. Don't know if this a FreeBSD or X11 thing.

I recommend going with 5.4-Release unless you plan on contributing.

Cheers,

Tom