Ed Kasky wrote: > I too am running FC6 and know that an upgrade to FC8 is inevitable. > What scares me is upgrading a single server in a small business that > relies on email (with spamassasin and plugins) and ftp services. > > Has anyone had any difficultes that caused major downtime during an > upgrade to 8 from 5 or 6? My upgrade from fc5->fc8 had 2 major problems and a number of much smaller ones. The major problems were: 1) the "yum upgrade" attempt had too many old, orphaned RPMs to work "out of the box". I had to remove a number of "old" RPMs in order to get it to work right. The changes to Perl and Python basically hosed 1/2 the package upgrades until this got sorted out. 2) When 1 failed, I tried to upgrade via the F-8 DVD. I ran into bz372011. None of the suggested fixes worked for me. In the end, I found the remaining packages that held up my upgrade, removed them, and the "yum upgrade" worked as expected. Stage 2: fixing the packages after updating. This is an ongoing project. I had the usual problems with some package's config files not surviving the upgrade process in working condition. It didn't take much to get most of them working. But, I'm still tracking some things down. named didn't work right for me. Its config file changed way to much for the resulting merge to work right. In fact, I'm still not sure I have it right as I'm experiencing some odd "hangs", especially when sending emails. My sendmail milter chain required fixing up the configs for all 3 milters that I use: sendmail-milter-spf, milter-greylist, and clamav-milter. Spamassassin was one of the more painless upgrades. I'm still tinkering with milter-greylist, once again, its config file had major changes that didn't survive the upgrade. I've recently gotten rid of the "GeoIP is not available" errors, but I'm still not sure everything is working right (I've got some broken pipe errors I think I just fixed too, only time will tell). No major downtime though. However it sucks when you to the upgrade, then some stuff doesn't work, and you have to find them one at a time. You need to remember that Fedora is a "rolling beta" for Red Hat. If you need more stability, you should be running RHEL or CENTOS instead on your server systems, especially your critical servers. Yes, it helps to go through *ALL* of the .rpmsave and .rpmnew stuff to reconfigure, so it helps to capture the output of the upgrade somewhere's (I think the installation media methods do this by default in /root/update.log or something similar, but heaven help you if you have to run it more than once....). > Are there and special precatutions one should take aside from having > redundant backups of all data, and tracking packages, etc? I just bit the bullet and went ahead and did it. My data survived, though gnome has problems if you try and continue to use your old configurations. It pretty much wiped out my panels and I had to re-create them by hand. > Also, with 9 due out in April, would it be better in the long run to > wait the 4 months? I waited some 4 months past the end of FC5 before I started. I wouldn't wait that long for FC6 though. There have already been kernel updates to f7 and f8 that you have no counterparts for in f6. Plus you have the added bonus that if you were using ATRpms, Axel took down his fc6 build machines before the final fc6 kernel was released (so he never built the usual kernel support modules for that kernel) so your fc6 kernel might be even further out-of-date if you require any of them. YMMV > Ed This is just my experience. I've been doing multiple-jump upgrades since RH6->RH7.3->RH9->FC2->FC5->FC8 on my home server. I've managed to survive everyone of them. -- Kevin J. Cummings kjchome@xxxxxxx cummings@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx cummings@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Registered Linux User #1232 (http://counter.li.org)
