Fedora 18 Upgrade Experience

[Brown, David M JR]

Fellow Devs,

I know you guys are talking a lot about the Fedora 18 slip and who's to blame etc. But I decided to upgrade most of my systems anyway, I'm not here to complain I realize I get to keep the pieces and I'm smart enough to fix them (and work around them) until things get settled down.

However, I'd like to at least write about my experience so far, I've upgraded two desktops (x86_64 and i386), a laptop (x86_64) and a cobbler server (x86_64). I performed the Yum upgrade procedure on the two desktops flawlessly and it worked great, except for the sssd bug that got fixed the next day. The laptop as well was very easy to upgrade and it has an encrypted root file system, which still works, no issues so far. The cobbler server was a bit different since I was running f16 instead of f17. That process was a bit more involved since it required a reformat of the root drive and a reinstall of the OS, without anaconda that was interesting. Just to beat the old dead horse some more, I couldn't get anaconda to work at all in f18. Every time I got to the "select a disk and try to make partitions and file systems" it failed on me, but I can get around that done it before.

To install the cobbler server I first loaded a liveusb of fedora 17, I then went to a terminal and manually created my partition setup using parted and created volume groups and file systems, etc. I then ran the 'yum --releasever=18 --disableplugin=presto --installroot=/mnt/system install @Core kernel grub2 lvm2 dracut' to bootstrap my system. This is by no means supported and since its a beta OS I've already agreed to keep the pieces. After bootstrapping my system I chrooted and fixed some stuff, rpm --rebuilddb, root password, touch /.autorelabel, grub2-install, dracut -f, yum -y update, etc. There were a few more files that anaconda puts in place that aren't part of the system that you have to create but they aren't hard especially when you've got samples hanging around everywhere. This got me to a booted base system with Fedora 18 :D. I also setup this system to run virtual machines and that also seemed to work really well. There needs to be some policy kit documentation changes that are needed on the libvirt.org wiki about adding permissions for a specific user access to the system vm space, but that's their problem to fix.

Now onto the issues with some of the rest of the build, I did the standard install process for cobbler (that I like), yum install cobbler dhcp bind syslinux rsync and that went okay. There were a couple of issues with systemd not started named or ddclient. Seems there was an update to systemd such that it keeps looking for a pid file and killing the process when it doesn't find the pid file in a reasonable time. Seems named needs to have its configuration changed to force the pid-file location to where systemd expects it, which is a little weird to me. Also, both ddclient and named wanted their pid locations to be in directories that don't exist and aren't owned by the right user. So right now I've got to go into the named.template file in cobbler and add the pid-file directive to where systemd expects the file to be, which seems like a bug somewhere. And there's the creation of the pid file directories for both named and ddclient that seem to disappear every time I reboot, also seems like a bug somewhere.

So to finish up, I'm pretty satisfied with Fedora 18 once I get it installed. Seems to work really well, however I'm a bit more resourceful than that average user I think. Anyway keep up the good work and I think once anaconda gets their fixes in there the release will be close at hand.

Thanks,
- David Brown