Clean Installs are Remarkable

[Joel Rees]

On Fri, Dec 23, 2011 at 9:10 AM, Reindl Harald <h.reindl at thelounge.net> wrote:
>
>
> On 23.12.2011 01:04, Joel Rees wrote:
>> On Fri, Dec 23, 2011 at 5:01 AM, Reindl Harald <h.reindl at thelounge.net> wrote:
>>> i made some hundret dist-upgrades since 2006 with yum
>>> yes they are sometimes not "start and forget" but it takes
>>> me 1-3 days after a fresh-install (many services, customized
>>> configs) and so i prepare dist-upgrades on ONE virtual machine
>>
>> How long does it take to prepare that first one?
>>
>> Preupgrade took me about 44 hours, F14 to F15. Yum upgrade would have
>> been about the same, according to my past experiences.
>
> what the hell takes 44 hours?

about 12 hours download
about 2 hours in busy-cursor preparing this and preparing that
about 4 hours in checking dependencies
about 12 hours for the install
about 12 hours for the cleanup

I don't know where the other 2 hours went, but I started at 7 one
morning, finally got the "really upgrade?" prompt before I sent the
kids to bed, got up in the middle of the night to check it (still
resolving dependencies), had to use my son's 12 year old iBook to work
that day, ended sometime before 5 am the following morning, just in
time to check google maps and get to a special seasonal assignment.

Probably would be somewhat faster if I had more than 768M RAM. LVM
fragmentation may be slowing things down. (I''ve added to /var twice
so that yum upgrade and preupgrade would have have room to cache the
downloads. I guess next time I'll just migrate /var to the new drive I
bought last summer.) Speaking of LVM fragmentation, there's another
reason it may be reasonable to just do a fresh install.

Sempron 2600 (1.7GHz, single processor) since you ask. Yeah, I wish I
could afford a multi-processor mobo. I know that would have sped up
the dependency check and transaction checks. And lots of RAM would be
great for VMs, which, yeah, I want to be able to use. As you point
out, they should make the transition a bit easier.

And right now, I'm fussing with a bug in the login dialog, where it
adds lots of nologin users and then won't scroll. Had to
blind-down-cursor to the others item in the login list to login by
name on the user I surf the web on, so I could look at google maps.
Not sure whether I should fuss with that more today or just get back
to work, however.

> on mobile-internet maybe

1M ADSL. Can't afford to go optical.

> i do not calculate one-time download

12 hours with the machine on is twelve hours with the machine on.
Yeah, I was doing other work, but it was also maxing my connection.
And checking to make sure I wasn't stalled. Not full-block, but not
free.

>>> there are important packages rebuilt from source with removed
>>> restart of services due update, newer versions than fedora for
>>> many reasons and after the preparing each dist-upgrade on the
>>> other servers takes 5-7 minutes while all services are running
>>> and 20-30 seconds for the reboot
>>
>> But I'm sure you didn't have 3,450 packages in you virtual machines.
>
> no 1,7134 - do not forget the devel-stuff

17,134 packages? And I thought I had too much in this machine.

> but who acres on modern ahrwadre and 100Mbit WAN?

Do you understand that your prejudices are showing, there?

>> But I do wish the upgrade weren't so much of a chasm to cross every
>> six months.
>
> if you have a problem with the every six months fedora is wrong for
> you - but if you like fresh software CentOS is wrong for you
>
> you can not have frehs software and no big upgrades
> not now and not in the future

Uhm. Yeah. Whatever. My son's iBook also runs openBSD. (I have to
borrow it back regularly, and I use openBSD for some stuff. No, he
does not like openBSD yet.)

The thing is, I have recommended Ubuntu and Fedora to semi-technically
inclined friends in the past. I can't do that any more.

Yeah, I need to get a fat USB drive for playing with Mint and Cent and
such, but my kids need Christmas presents first.

Different ways of doing things, and sometimes there are reasons for
the differences.