Upgrade encrypted OpenBSD 6.3 to 6.4 on Vultr hosting

       209 words, 1 minutes

Another OpenBSD release, another upgrade on the Vultr hosting system. The whole process went smooth from OpenBSD 6.3 to 6.4 with encrypted root.

As written in the docs, simply download the 6.4 bsd.rd file and place it on /. Reboot, enter current passphrase and boot the install image.

boot> bsd.rd

Create the device for the encrypted disk before upgrading:

Welcome to the OpenBSD/amd64 X.X installation program.
(I)nstall, (U)pgrade, (A)utoinstall or (S)hell? s

# cd /dev
# sh MAKEDEV sd1
# exit

Proceed to the upgrade:

Welcome to the OpenBSD/amd64 X.X installation program.
(I)nstall, (U)pgrade, (A)utoinstall or (S)hell? u

Which disk is the root disk? sd1

[...]

CONGRATULATIONS! Your OpenBSD install has been successfully completed!

# mv /mnt/etc/rc.local.conf /mnt/etc/rc.local.conf.orig
# reboot

Before rebooting, I renamed rc.local.conf so that the system will boot without extra daemons. There are a few changes to apply and sysmerge asked for a few configuration files to review. Then I ran pkg_add -U and pkg_delete -a to deal with third-party software. Finally, I renamed rc.local.conf.orig and rebooted.

All in all, it went smooth. The OpenSMTPD upgrade wasn’t straight-forward but gilles@ helped a lot and smtpd(8) was up and running in minutes. I’ll post about the changes later.

Should anyone care, the dmesg file is available here