Upgrade from RH9 to FC3 or FC4

[dsavage at peaknet.net]

On Fri, June 10, 2005 at 3:20 pm "Botond Kardos" <Botond.Kardos at essnet.se>
wrote:
>     Hi,
>     I have an old machine running as a firewall. It's basically an RH9
> installation with some custom-made packages (kernel, openssh, few
> others). If I revert my system to standard RH9 is it possible to upgrade
> it to FC3 or FC4? Is this upgrade possible without a CD (for example
> boot-floppy + NFS or FTP server)?
>     My main reason for the intention to upgrade is the fear of rootkits.
> AFAIK FC3 and its targeted SELinux policy gives the feeling of safety
> regarding rootkits and other privilege escalation vulnerabilities.

Botond,

There was a major change in the required size of the swap partition with
the introduction of FC3 and the 2.6 kernel.  Under FC4 you will need a
swap partition twice the size of your system memory up to a max of about
2GB.  Very few FC9 systems had swap partitions large enough for FC3.  For
that and many other reasons, you will avoid a LOT of problems if you
simply back up your data and do a fresh install of FC4.

It's becoming increasingly difficult to install Fedora or any other major
Linux distribution without using a CD.  The reason is that the 2.6 kernel
is simply too large to fit on a floppy.  There have been some recent posts
to this list that point to work-arounds that start with MS-DOS floppies
and loadlin, but they all sound a bit tweaky for most folks.  Do you have
the option of putting a CD in your firewall box just for FC4 installation,
then removing it before putting it back into production service?  These
days even an NFS or FTP install starts with a CD boot-up.

--Doc Savage
  Fairview Heights, IL