On Thu, Dec 29, 2005 at 05:50:18PM -0500, Theo Van Dinter wrote:
around I was thinking of either using yum or burning some CDs and doing the upgrade method (which the Fedora guys recommended to me).
Anyone have suggestions about what method works best? Any gotchas I should worry about, etc?
Using anacaconda is the official, supported method of upgrading a Fedora system. The reason is simple: certain tasks cannot be done on the live running system, but instead must be done from outside the normal system environment (e.g. filesystem/lvm conversion, incompatible kernel<->userspace changes like NPTL, new kernel features like SELinux support, rpm scriptlets). I've had success upgrading to FC4 from as far back as Red Hat Linux 7.3. That being said, yum sometimes works well if you take into account some of the manual tasks you may need to do before and after, e.g. sometimes you must remove several older kernel versions manually before attempting the yum update. The success of this method deteriorates increasingly as the version difference of the before and after OSes increases. I have not used this method extensively except between FC test and development (rawhide) releases. What I have been doing recently for remote upgrades is using the grub installed on the existing OS to boot the anaconda installer environment with the proper command line arguments to start a VNC-based network install. You then reboot the system, wait a few moments, and connect to it via VNC to finish the graphical install manually. Of course, you could also use kickstart to completely automate this with no user interaction required. cd /boot wget -O vmlinuz-fc4 http://<fc-mirror>/pub/fedora/linux/core/4/i386/os/isolinux/vmlinuz wget -O initrd-fc4.img http://<fc-mirror>/pub/fedora/linux/core/4/i386/os/isolinux/initrd edit /etc/grub.conf, adding this to the beginning: title Fedora Core 4 installer root (hd0,0) kernel /vmlinuz-fc4 headless ip=dhcp ksdevice=eth0 method=http://<fc-mirror>/pub/fedora/linux/core/4/i386/os lang=en_US keymap=us vnc vncpassword=<password> initrd /initrd-fc4.img Notes: 1. If you have multiple NICs, eth0 may not be the one you think it will be once you reboot into the installer. Therefore, it is highly recommended to specify the desired install NIC using its MAC address: ksdevice=aa:bb:cc:dd:ee:Ff 2. Don't forget to set the default boot entry in grub to the installer entry, e.g. default=0 Reboot: shutdown -r now vncviewer <remote-ip>:0 IMPORTANT: Be sure to select "Create a new bootloader configuration". I found out the hard way that "Update existing bootloader configuration" will leave you with no way to remotely boot into the new OS after the upgrade is completed, because grub will default to booting the installer over and over again, and remotely re-upgrading and selecting "Create a new bootloader configuration" afterwards will not re-write the bootloader because it only does that if a new kernel gets installed, which it won't since it was already installed the first time you upgraded... Finally, SELinux doesn't get enabled automatically on upgrades, but you can easily enable it manually afterwards: yum install setools selinux-policy-targeted touch /.autorelabel reboot More info: http://fedora.redhat.com/docs/fedora-install-guide-en/ http://www.arenatechniques.com/kb/index.php/Anaconda http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Anaconda http://fedora.redhat.com/docs/selinux-faq/