Some programs like TeamSpeak does not work with 4.7, neither did the USB mass storage device work eitehr so see if 4.8 will help fix this. I’m using /stadn/sysinstall to upgrade. The process seems quite straight forward.

But turned out to take much longer time…
-more->
After doing the upgrade I realized that I actually had an older kernel than before, even older than the release. It was 4.7 Generic kernel, I had not set the configure option to 4.8-RELEASE and thus just downloaded 4.7 once more.

After changing the option to 4.8-RELEASE I ran into another problem or misshapp. Somehow the upgrade process failed and hang during the ftp session. I aborted the upgrade but it turned out that all files in /etc had been replaced with the ones from the upgrade, thus I could not login to the machine remotely since no users exsisted anymore. Had to drag out the box out of the closet and plugin in the keyboard and a monitor. Login in locally worked. But how to get the backup(Yes I had a backup made in case…) of etc/ was not soo easy. Finally I figured out I could use a friends ftp site and uploade the backup from my PC and download it to the server. Replaced all files and we were back!

But still only had 4.7… So another try at /stand/sysinstall, changed options and this time it worked.

Time to reboot the system.
FAIL: Got “Device not Configured” for one of the harddrives. Turned out after some investigation that my 4.7 kernel did not use static numbering of ata drives while the new did. So boot the old kernel and modify fstab to the new drive numbering and now it worked just fine.

At this point of the upgrade my outside access did not work because the GENERIC kernel does not include.

I had to build a new kernel and install it. I used the same Kernel config as for 4.7 but checked it for changes, there were only a few. Though while editing the file I made sure that the new kernel also would have static ATA device numberign to make it easier next time.

To configure the kernel:

1. cd /usr/src/sys/i386/conf

Make a copy of GENERIC called NEWKER and modify it to your taste.

To start the build process use the config command :

1. config NEWKER

After this step you will get the following message

Don’t forget to do make depend

If you get any errors in this step, then there is a problem in your configuration file. Check the file again and edit it. Refer to GENERIC and LINT for more details regarding device drivers.

Go to the following directory and compile the kernel.

1. cd /usr/src/sys/compile/NEWKER

Do the following steps to compile the kernel:

1. make depend
2. make
3. make install

After rebooting the system all worked, even TeamSpeak and USB mass!