HowTo: Upgrade FreeBSD 7.2 to 7.3

Disclaimer: this post is for those that instead of using FreeBSD's excellent documentation maintain the bad habit of googling for things already covered in the project's official documentation. This is more or less a copy-paste of the FreeBSD 7.3-RELEASE Announcement instructions for upgrading 7.2 to 7.3.

These are needed steps to upgrade, through the binary upgrade method, the kernel and userland utilities to 7.3-RELEASE:

1. % su
2. # freebsd-update upgrade -r 7.3-RELEASE
3. # freebsd-update install
4. # shutdown -r now
   
5. % su
6. # freebsd-update install
7. # shutdown -r now
   

On step 1 we've started of by becoming the superuser. Step 2 initiates the freebsd-update utility pointing the upgrade to 7.3-RELEASE, after that we proceed with the installation of the kernel on step 3.

Upon rebooting the new kernel is enabled and we move into step 6. Here we end the upgrade process by updating the userland utilities.

That's it!

If you found this post useful that's actually a bad news: you aren't reading the project's official documentation! So please point to http://www.freebsd.org and educate yourself on FreeBSD ;)