FC2 to 5 upgrade

[Travis Bullock]

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?

Cheers,

Travis Bullock 
Systems Administrator 
Avmax Group Inc.

[Chris Jones]

On Wednesday 18 April 2007 10:13:51 pm Travis Bullock wrote:
> 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?

Putting aside for a moment the fact the FC has never been a good distro choice 
for mission critical servers... I would say it would be a very bad idea to 
expect an upgrade from FC2 to FC5 to be anything other than rather painful. 
Never done that sort of jump myself but wouldn't expect it to be fun.

MUCH better to wait for FC7 if you can and do a clean install.

Better still, if this is a mission critical machine to choose a distro with a 
longer life span better suited to servers, like centos or scientific linux.

Chris

[Travis Bullock]

How about RHEL?

Travis Bullock
Systems Administrator
Avmax Group Inc.

----- Original Message -----
From: "Chris Jones" 
To: "For users of Fedora" 
Sent: Wednesday, April 18, 2007 3:34:59 PM (GMT-0700) America/Denver
Subject: Re: FC2 to 5 upgrade

On Wednesday 18 April 2007 10:13:51 pm Travis Bullock wrote:
> 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?

Putting aside for a moment the fact the FC has never been a good distro choice 
for mission critical servers... I would say it would be a very bad idea to 
expect an upgrade from FC2 to FC5 to be anything other than rather painful. 
Never done that sort of jump myself but wouldn't expect it to be fun.

MUCH better to wait for FC7 if you can and do a clean install.

Better still, if this is a mission critical machine to choose a distro with a 
longer life span better suited to servers, like centos or scientific linux.

Chris

[Kevin Kofler]

Travis Bullock <tbullock <at> avmax.ca> writes:
> How about RHEL?

If your employer is willing to shell out the money for a support contract, why 
not? But be warned that the "upgradeany" option (upgrading from FC2 or any 
other Fedora release) is definitely NOT supported (I think they don't even 
support upgrades from older RHEL, though I might be wrong about that one), so 
you'll have to do a clean install if you want to benefit from the support 
contract.

CentOS or Scientific Linux give you essentially the same packages without the 
support contract (and thus also without the cost associated with it).

Kevin Kofler

[Chris Jones]

> CentOS or Scientific Linux give you essentially the same packages without
> the support contract (and thus also without the cost associated with it).

Yes, both these distros are directly derived from RHEL. Part of their mission 
statements are to remain as close as possible to RHEL.

If you install these you will get a system that is basically RHEL, without the 
cost (and thus the 'official' support). I use Scientific Linux systems at 
work (a lab working with CERN, one of the homes of SL...) and it works very 
well I think.

Chris

[Strong]

On Wed, 18 Apr 2007 23:51:39 +0100 Chris Jones
 wrote:
> > CentOS or Scientific Linux give you essentially the same packages
> > without the support contract (and thus also without the cost
> > associated with it).

It seems its repos are very poor. At least comparing to Fedora's. May I
will change for CentOS but this prevents me from doing so...

[Akemi Yagi]

On Thu, 03 May 2007 09:38:21 +0700, Strong wrote:
> On Wed, 18 Apr 2007 23:51:39 +0100 Chris Jones 
> wrote:
> > > CentOS or Scientific Linux give you essentially the same packages
> > > without the support contract (and thus also without the cost
> > > associated with it).
>
> It seems its repos are very poor. At least comparing to Fedora's. May I
> will change for CentOS but this prevents me from doing so...

I believe you mean 3rd party repositories.  If you are dependent on many
packages that are only available from 3rd party repos, yes, CentOS might
not be for you. However, you might want to take a look at the current list
of repositories for CentOS to see if what you need is now included:

http://wiki.centos.org/Repositories

Akemi

[Kevin Kofler]

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

[Chris Jones]

> 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.

Is it just me who finds this rather odd ? That FC's installer seemingly needs 
as much ram as a fully fledged gnome/KDE desktop !! A simple headless server 
can run on much less that 256M, and if you want there are light desktops 
around, like XFCE, FVWM etc.

It seems downright bizarre that something like a installer needs so much ram.

If you want, you can skip the funky gui installer and use test mode instead, 
although I've luckily never needed it myself so far (although maybe 1G won't 
be enough for FC7 anaconda... ;))
> 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.

Same here. I use FC on my home machines as I like playing with the new stuff. 
But at work, where I need to be serious, it would be a poor choice. 
Scientific Linux works very well in my experience but I'm sure centos is as 
good. I've just never tried it myself.

Chris

[Travis Bullock]

Thanks Kevin. Good advice and I appreciate it. This is basically just a Samba/WINS/Name server that also routes between subnets. So obviously it is mission critical but not overly complicated.

I basically want to upgrade now because I seem to be having issues with Samba and my current version is only 3.0.3.-5 which is somewhat embarassing. Plus any advice I seek in the Samba mail list will most likely not be geared towards such a old version of Samba.

I do have distro's burned for FC4 and 5 as over the years I continually add linux machines (just don't upgrade them *tsk tsk*) Should I download FC6 and then do sequential upgrades from 4 to 5 to 6? Or just do direct to 6?

Cheers,

Travis Bullock
Systems Administrator
Avmax Group Inc.

----- Original Message -----
From: "Kevin Kofler" 
To: [e-mail]
Sent: Wednesday, April 18, 2007 3:47:29 PM (GMT-0700) America/Denver
Subject: Re: FC2 to 5 upgrade

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

[Bazooka Joe]

It depends on what the server is doing...   If it is just a file
server or a name server it will be a breeze.

If it is a full blown web/mail/db/name..... then yes a lot of changes
have happened since fc2 and it will be like starting from scratch but
harder.

I am facing the same prob w/ a fc4 production web server and seriously
thinking centos instead of my beloved fc

On 4/18/07, Travis Bullock  wrote:
> 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?
>
> Cheers,
>
> Travis Bullock
> Systems Administrator
> Avmax Group Inc.
>
> --
> fedora-list mailing list
> [e-mail]
> To unsubscribe:
> https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list

[Robin Laing]

Travis Bullock wrote:
> 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?
>
> Cheers,
>
> Travis Bullock
> Systems Administrator
> Avmax Group Inc.

I tried and upgrade from FC4 to FC6 and it wasn't pretty.  It worked but 
there was a lot of mess to clean up after.  It was easier to do a clean 
install.  There are many changes that have occurred and thus won't 
update nicely.

As others stated.  Go with Centos if your servers are critical and wait 
a month and go to FC7.  Support for FC5 will be ending soon so there 
will be no updates and you will be back where you started.

Also, the clean install went much faster than the upgrade.

Also, if the server is really critical, I would look at building a new 
server and use the old one as a backup.