Case for an occasional system refresh or clean install

[Temlakos]

Everyone:

No complaints here. Just some insights from some recent experiences.

Bottom line: everyone who administers a Fedora system, should do a 
"clean install" or an effective system refresh (reinstalling the OS and 
all apps on a system having a separate /home partition) at least, I 
would say, once for every three new versions of Fedora. The "fedup" app 
lets too many minor faults accumulate in a system over time. Result: you 
are cheating yourself and your users of a good user experience.

Long ago I did a yum upgrade from F14 to F17. At first everything went 
swimmingly. And then I got the problem some of you  might remember my 
complaining about: after two hours of operation, or maybe four or five 
or six hours if I were especially blessed (or as quickly as five minutes 
if I were under a special curse), new windows and dialog boxes would 
open as an unrelieved black. (Some KDE pop-up menus and notifications 
would pop up as a transparent outline.) I filed bug after bug after bug 
with Bugzilla. I re-filed with every new upgrade, which I accomplished 
with fedup. From F17->F18, F18->F19, and F19->F20, the problem 
persisted. Frankly I'm surprised the PTB's didn't CLOSE the bug as WONTFIX.

Two weeks ago I acquired a new, replacement machine for one of the two 
mini-towers on myh network. At the same time, the mouse on my F20 
machine went wild, opening and closing windows and pushing buttons 
without my conscious input, so I couldn't stop it. Finally the mouse 
just quit. I figured out what happened: the mouse cable had frayed. 
Happily, with the new shipment, I got a USB mouse and a USB keyboard 
that I now can keep as spares.

But I decided to put F20 on another machine I had intended to replace. 
(It was a video-capture machine, and I needed a faster processor with 
more memory to do it properly.) I figured, why not go from a Pentium 
Dual-Core with 3 GB RAM and a 500-GB HDD to an Intel Core 2 Quattro with 
8 MB RAM and a 1TB HDD?

This involved downloading and burning an F20 KDE live spin, inserting it 
into the intended replacement machine, and doing a complete system 
format--reclaim the drive space, put in the new automatic partition (50 
GB for /, 8 GB of swap, 500-MB physical boot partition, and all the 
rest, 790 GB, for /home), install F20 from the Internet, and 
painstakingly replicate my old environment--or at least those parts of 
it I wanted. Fresh install of samba, Firefox, Thunderbird, gnucash, and 
any other application I used regularly.

I learned later that the old machine had been providing a crutch for 
samba connectivity to other machines on the network. When I retired the 
old machine, I lost that. Temporarily. I had to relearn everything I'd 
learned and forgotten about configuring samba by directly editing the 
smb.conf file. But now I have two machines--a desktop and a laptop--that 
can establish samba connectivity independently.

But that black rectangle problem I complained about? That is now solved!

And something else: dialog buttons have a new, "more modern" look. This 
should have come with the F19->F20 fedup upgrade. But it did not. It 
came with a clean install on a brand-new physical box, to which I have 
migrated all my "stuff."

I can only conclude that the yum upgrade introduced the first of several 
cumulative errors. Every upgrade since then, introduced another one, and 
another, and another. These errors pile up. They won't cause a 
catastrophic failure, but they will create several annoying problems you 
might never solve.

To the development team that gave us fedup, listen up! Your application 
is not taking care of all these little things.

With /home partitioned off separately (as an LVM partition), I assume I 
can install F21 "cleanly" in the / partition without risking losing the 
contents of /home or my access to them. But I still have to write down 
every modification I made to a configuration file--or else keep copies 
of those files in /home. They would include, I also assume, things like 
the files holding the UIDs, GIDs, and passwords for Users and Groups.

That's the only reason I don't plan to do a clean install every time. 
But I wouldn't mind doing it every other time, or every third time. To 
make sure these cumulative errors don't build up again.

Again, I offer this to provide some insight into problems that we 
"amateur system administrators" sometimes have.

Temlakos