Re: Want to upgrade Fedora, 6 to current. Advice or tips please!

On 09/06/2008 09:32 PM, Ohmster sent:
I will admit it, my Linux is getting long in the tooth and I am begriming
to worry about security and getting out of the up to date loop. I already
learned this lesson by hanging on to Red Hat 9 almost 2 years after EOL.
The script kiddies had a ball with my server when they found apache
running on a system that far out of date. No more of that please!

I am currently running Fedora Core 6 with Beryl 3D desktop and an FX5200
card and man I love it! This is on an 800Mhz Pentium III Coppermine with
1.5Gb SDRAM and a 200Gb hard drive and an ISA AWE 64 Gold sound card. I
host 3 domains on apache and everything works so well I am almost afraid
to *** with it but it is getting late now and it has to be done.

I downloaded the Fedora Core 9 CD discs as I do not have a DVD drive in
the machine and anaconda stalled at python, gave me some kind of error
and would not install with GUI or text mode. I tried to get a camera and
get a picture of the monitor but I cannot read it. Maybe I can...

Running anaconda 11.4.0.02, the Fedora system installer - please wait...
/usr/bin/python: error while loading shared libraries:
libpython2.5.so.1.8: ca(something)
(something something) shared object file: No such file or directory
Install exited abnormally [1/1]
sending termination signals...done
disabling...
...and it goes on to list the unmounted filesystems and then
you may safely reboot your system

I then googled a bit and found you cannot upgrade nicely from 6 to 9 like
that, going from 6 to 7 "breaks" modprobe in that they use different
kernel modules that will not load so do not upgrade with yum from 6 to 7,
use an install DVD or install discs. I looked all over for Fedora 7
install CDs and cannot find them, only a few DVD isos out there. Might be
time to break down, spend $25 at newegg and buy a nice new IDE DVD burner
for this computer, it has been very good to me and has been a perfect,
online server for years and years. Never shuts down or gives me any
trouble.

I now read the Fedora upgrade FAQ:
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/YumUpgradeFaq

And they give things to watch out for when upgrading from version to
version. I know a clean install would solve all my problems and I am
tempted to just buy a cheap 200Gb hard drive, put it in, install Fedora 9
on it, and copy stuff over from my old hard drive to the new one, I won't
lose anything that way, and life will be grand. One problem, Fedora uses
LVM for default installs and always names the disc VolGroup00 with
LogVol00 and LogVol01. When I went and did my last upgrade, I decided to
go fresh with a new drive and then reconnect the old drive so I could
copy over. No dice, they both had the same name and I could not mount the
old disk anymore. Not knowing what I was doing, I used Webmin Logical
Volume Management to create a logical group on the disk, thinking this
would help, it didn't, it hosed the drive and I got it back by the skin
of my teeth by using dd I believe. It is a tale of disaster worthy of
archiving and I did archive it for anyone else that had to go through
that. Makes interesting reading here:
http://linux.derkeiler.com/Newsgroups/alt.os.linux/2006-10/msg00258.html

I need some help. Is it best to install Fedora 9 on a new hard drive and
pluck my files off the old disk? If so, will Fedora 9 mount hdb1 and hdb2
which the old drive will become now as VolGroup00 or am I going to be in
conflict again because the new Fedora 9 will be installed on the new disk
named VolGroup00 again? If so, is there a way around this?

If not, do I have to upgrade from 6 to 7 then 7 to 8 then 8 to 9? That
would really suck. I want to keep my scripts and my httpd.conf file
because they all work very well. I also want to keep the main /var/www/
website up as well as 2 more down in userdirs as public_html with cgi and
everything that is setup on them. Is this possible?

The 6 to 7 FAQ says the following:


Fedora Core 6 -> Fedora 7

* Fedora 7 replaces the old IDE subsystem with libata. Drive device
names which previously started /dev/hd.. will become /dev/sd.. after the
upgrade. /dev/hda1 will usually become /dev/sda1, although there may not
be a direct relationship between the old and new device names (for
example hdd does not necessarily become sdd). Before you reboot be sure
to change all references to /dev/hd.. in your config, especially
/etc/fstab - where it however may be simpler to refer to filesystems by
label (check out the programs blkid, tune2fs, and mlabel). LVM Volume
names are not affected. In /boot/grub/device.map change /dev/hd.. to
/dev/sd.. before running grub-install - and don't change (hd0). Changing
/boot/grub/grub.conf may also be required.

* The libata layer represents all hard disks as SCSI disks, which are
limited to 15 partitions in the kernel. IDE hard disks with more than 15
partitions are not supported in Fedora 7.

* On a system which has been upgraded from releases prior to FC6 you
may need to remove up2date and rhnlib rpm -e rhnlib up2date

* If you see the message package gpm-1.20.1-84.fc6 (which is newer
than gpm-1.20.1-83.fc7) is already installed when performing a yum update
uninstall and reinstall the gpm package.

* If you had installed Suns jre it might be removed during upgrade.
Be aware that jre-6u1/jre-1.6.0_01-fcs requires compat-libstdc++-33.


Do I gotta really do all that stuff, it seems pretty hard, can someone
advise me on this please? Then what, go through all of this again for
each upgrade all the way to 9? Or just get a new drive, install it,
install Fedora 9 right from the discs, and then how to mount the old
LogVol00 IDE disc again?

Please help, this is driving me crazy!


Hello to All:

Maybe I just don't get it. Your server is working OK with your current
hardware. To me that means you don't have an issue with transactions
per second nor do you seem to need more ram. The comment that "it is
getting late now and it has to be done" is bewildering to me.

I'm surprised that a distribution like RHEL5/CentOS5 wasn't picked for
its support and stability. After all, both are based on FC6. What
might be offered to the users by going to F9 or a later to F10?
Unquestionably F9, or F10, would offer leading edge kernels, but would
that really give your users something they don't have now?

Shouldn't this server be headless or nearly so? Where am I going wrong?

My best regards to all.

--
1PW

@?6A62?FEH9:DE=6o2@=]4@> [r4o7t]
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