Travis Bullock <tbullock <at> avmax.ca> writes:
> Hey,What kind of disasterous outcome should I expect from sticking my FC5
> cd's into my existing MISSION CRITICAL server and upgrading from FC2 to
> FC5?What is the general concensus? Smooth operation? Or freakin' nightmare?
> Should I jump on board with FC6?
Upgrading to FC5 now is a bad idea, in just a few weeks (~2 months even if the
planned lifetime extension to 2 releases + 1 month is fully implemented; if
not, it might be even less!) you'll be stuck with the same problem all over
again. If you want to stay with Fedora, go with the latest, i.e. FC6, or even
wait a month and go with Fedora 7.
As it looks obvious that you care way more about lifetime than current software
(else you wouldn't be on FC2 now, nor even considering FC5 with FC6 out for
months and F7 soon to come), I can suggest moving to CentOS 5 instead. You get
essentially the same software as with FC6 (minus some updates FC6 got
post-release which weren't judged acceptable for RHEL). CentOS will accept to
upgrade a Fedora installation if you pass it the "upgradeany" parameter
(without the quotes) on the installer's kernel boot line.
As for your other question about how safe it is to upgrade skipping releases,
well, I did FC2->FC5, though not on a server (so I'm not sure the package sets
are comparable). You may have to disable SELinux in the installer (selinux=0)
if you do that. I haven't personally tried FC2->FC6 or FC2->CentOS 5, but I
don't think it matters at that point (i.e. I don't expect FC2->FC6/CentOS5 to
be worse than FC2->FC5). One thing to make sure is that you have enough RAM,
Anaconda (the installer) in particular is pretty memory-hungry these days and
wants 256 MB at the very least.
If I were in your situation, I'd probably upgrade the server to CentOS 5 doing
the upgradeany trick and hope for the best. It'd make me feel pretty uneasy to
directly do this on a mission-critical production server, but FC2 has been
without any sort of security updates for a while (since Fedora Legacy stopped)
and you sure don't want that mission-critical server rooted either! So sooner
or later you'll have to move to something supported. If you pick CentOS 5,
you'll probably not have to do that again.
And before anyone here accuses me of pitching CentOS: I don't have any sort of
relations to the CentOS project, in fact I run Fedora on all my machines, not
CentOS, but I want current software and those are all home computers (or in one
case a QEMU VM I use only to build x86_64 packages). But for that
mission-critical server where staying current doesn't seem to matter (only
getting security updates does), I really think a long-term supported
distribution is the better option, because Fedora is all about staying current.
I hope this helps,
Kevin Kofler
