Preparing to upgrade - some questions

[Greg Morgan]

Truls Gulbrandsen wrote:

> Hi,
> I am preparing to upgrade from fc2 to fc3 and have made a backup of my
> /home directory.

That is a good start.

> 
> Are there other directories or files that should be copied before I 
> upgrade?

It depends.  If you are running your mail or databases on this PC, then 
you should consider the files stored in /var.  For example 
/var/spool/mail has each users incoming mail file.  The home directory 
may have mail folders.  This all depends on clients and servers in play 
for your mail configuration.  In the Red Hat world, perhaps, Linux 
Standards Base, LSB, too, /var contains database, web, and other 
"growing" related directories/filesystems.  You can skip /var/log, however.

> Will the upgrade option give me a complete installation or will it only
> upgrade files and modules already installed?

Anaconda stores two files in the /root/ directory. They are upgrade.log 
and install.log.  Both come into play in an upgrade.  They will have 
messages like "The following packages were available in this version but 
NOT upgraded:"  Based on that message, I'd say that it would upgrade 
just the packages that you have on the current system.  RPM dependencies 
will force other packages to be installed that may not have been on the 
prior version.

> 
> If I do a complete new installation will it be sufficient to install
> additional programs such as gramps, thunderbird and firefox and then

I use NFS mounted homes so I am not sure this is the correct answer.  In 
other words, my home directories are not mounted while anaconda is 
running.  However, I have noticed that the applications take care of 
changes to your .files or .directories located in your home directory, 
when a new or upgraded application runs for the first time after 
installation.  That application takes care of it.

 > copy the content of /home back to the hd to make it all work with data,
 > bookmarks and stored mail?

Be careful here.  Your bookmarks are stored in a ., dot directory.  I 
have an associate at work who rails against Red Hat because the 
installer does not save his configuration information.  Well this really 
is a Problem Exists Between Chair AND Keyboard, PEBCAK.  If you copy all 
  your files off and format everything, then you must pick up the dot 
files too or you will lose your personal configuration.  Use tar or pax. 
  If you did just a cp -r -p /home new_location, then all your dot files 
would be lost.  You have to add cp -r -p /home/*/.[a-zA-Z0-9]* 
new_location in another pass to copy the dot files too.   You must 
backup the dot files and then correctly restore them to save your 
bookmarks and gnome desktop configuration, etc.  In the case of Mozilla, 
the bookmarks and mail folders are stored in .mozilla directory in each 
user's home directory.  Take a look at these with ls -laF to see all the 
dot files.  You will not see them with just an ls -l.

I just came across the pax command.  The -rw mode is a copy function. 
The preserve, -p eop, options may be redundant but it works ok. I used 
it to copy several user's home directories with all their dot files to a 
new server via nfs recently.  I left myself with a captain's log that 
you could adapt for this process.  You must copy from the source directory!

# Copy all the files from /home to /home
# 1. Mount the source directory into /mnt/cdrom
#    I was too lazy to make a new mount point.
#    mount -t nfs baloo:/home /mnt/cdrom
# 2. cd into source directory
#    cd /mnt/cdrom
# 2. The target directory should have been created above
# 3. pax -rw -p eop . /targetdir
#    pax -rw -p eop . /home
# 4. Unmount the source directory
#    umount /mnt/cdrom

Pax can also operate on tar and cpio files.  You can also copy files by 
user, etc.--it's very powerful.  For what it is worth, I found it on MS 
Windows 2000 at work.  I am sure Billy Boy thought we would tar and cpio 
all our files up and untar them on MS Windows with one combination 
command.  However, pax might make MS Windows useful as a work around 
until a Linux box is available. ;-)

> 
> Any thing else I should be aware of in order to restore my pc with fc3
> without too much trouble?
> 

You may not have time to do this right now if you are biting the bit to 
get FC3 installed.  I have kickstart files that rebuild all the 
configuration information. Hence, I don't worry about the /etc 
directory.  I have my /home directory in a separate partition on my NFS 
server.  When I upgrade it, while using disk druid, I recreate the mount 
point for /home, but I do not check the box to format /home.  You may 
want to move your home directory to a separate partition, if you have 
time during this install.  It will save you some time during future 
installs.  You'd back up home, but you wouldn't have to copy the files 
back for each install unless you had an unplanned failure. :-(

Have fun,
Greg