FC2 to 5 upgrade

[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" <kevin.kofler at chello.at>
To: fedora-list at redhat.com
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

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