How To Upgrade 7.1 to 7.3 via yum

[John Dalbec]

I've upgraded 7.1 to 7.3 on several production servers.  I first did a 
traditional upgrade on a test copy of one of the servers.  I then compared the 
old and new package lists.  I rebuilt several customized packages because they 
were "older" than the 7.3 versions.  I installed the C library on the production 
servers.  This caused SSHd not to do initgroups() on login the next morning. 
Restarting SSHd fixed the problem.  I installed the custom packages on the 
production servers.  I installed the packages that were added during the 
traditional upgrade.  I installed the packages from CD 1 using rpm -Fvh a*.rpm, 
... rpm -Fvh z*.rpm, rpm -Fvh *.rpm.  I did the same with CDs 2 and 3. 
Occasionally I had to install packages from a different CD to satisfy 
dependencies so I just scp'd them to my account on the server from my 
workstation.  The one problem that bit me was that the default /etc/identd.conf 
changed to enable encryption of ident information.  I use ident authentication 
on my PostgreSQL server which is needed for web applications so that broke. 
Once I figured out that identd was the problem, I just had to change the default 
setting back.

I also upgraded 7.1 to 7.3 on my home firewall using apt-get.  I had a problem 
with gdk-pixbuf-gnome - apt-get wanted to remove it.  I wound up copying and 
pasting the "upgraded packages" list into separate apt-get commands a line at a 
time.  Eventually I figured out that if I specified gdk-pixbuf-gnome on the 
apt-get command it would upgrade it instead of removing it.  My one mistake was 
not re-running LILO.  Naturally I didn't have a boot disk available.  I had to 
make a boot floppy on a 7.3 system at work and figure out which partition was my 
root partition via trial and error.

My experience with yum leads me to believe that it doesn't resolve dependencies 
well when many packages are involved.  Apt-get is a much better tool for system 
upgrades.

My $0.02 USD,
John