Upgrade advice

[Jeffrey Ross]

> I'm looking for some suggestions on how to upgrade an older Fedora system
> and keep as many of the configurations as possible for the applications
> that are being used.
>
> Currently the system is running Fedora 16 and there are at least two
> things that are preventing me from successfully running fedup or the yum
> upgrade.
>
> The first stumbling block is that system was installed with separate
> partitions for /, /boot, /var, & /usr and I think that the separation of /
> and /usr is my biggest issue.
>
> The second issue is the system is setup with RAID1 on all partitions with
> the bootloader (Grub ?) installed on both disks in the event of a disk
> failure.
>
> I would like to avoid a new/clean install (I know I can preserve /home) if
> at all possible.
>
> Any suggestions on how to proceed?
>
> Thanks, Jeff
>

I think I'm going to just bite the bullet and do a fresh install while
preserving /home, I have enough space available on /home to backup of all
the other filesystems (at least temporarily) so I can retain copies of
whatever modifications I made in the past.  Luckily for me / and /usr are
on adjoining physical partitions so I before reinstalling I can merge the
two partitions back together.

At least fdisk shows my partition table starting at 2048 so at least I'm
good there.

I'll have to look through the current install guidelines to make sure I'm
not breaking some cardinal rule but at this point I'm planning on

/boot - Raid1
/ - Raid1
/var - Raid1
/home - Raid1
swap - Raid1

What is the current recommendation for swap?  I'm guessing it needs to be
at least the same size as physical memory.  Years ago unix upon a system
crash would start writing the crash file at the beginning of the swap
partition and keep going until it was done, if swap was smaller than
physical memory you had a problem as the system would happily write over
the next partition.

-Jeff