Re: RHEL 3->4: Upgrade or Fresh Install?

[Tom Sightler <ttsig tuxyturvy com>]

On Fri, 2005-03-04 at 17:53 -0600, dsavage peaknet net wrote:
> On Fri, 2005-03-04 at 08:38 -0500, Tim Evans wrote:
> > RedHat's official install manual is kinda stern about recommending fresh
> > installs rather than upgrading RHEL Version 3 to Version 4.
> >
> > What has been the list's experience?

I have upgraded 3 systems and none experienced major issues.  They were
a fairly diverse group, one was a Dell 6450 4 CPU system with 8GB of RAM
running Oracle 10G and Netvault (an enterprise backup application).

Another was a small web/email server running Apache with moderate use of
mod_perl and PHP, as well as MySQL.  The email server was Postfix for
the MTA and Courier IMAP for the POP/IMAP server.

The third was a Dell 2650 that ran Squid proxy for about 200 users,
hosted a CUPS print server with about 250 printers that prints about
10,000 documents a day, provides cross platform printing and file shares
with NFS/CUPS/Samba, and also provides basic services like DHCP and
dynamic DNS, MySQL, and network monitoring with of about 150 hosts with
Nagios and about 2000 graphs with Cacti.  Overall this was the toughest
system, but even there only a handful of things were troublesome, mostly
related to the MySQL upgrade.

I did not do anything with SElinux however so this might cause some
issues but overall it was a very smooth experience, actually, cleaner
than the upgrade from 2.1 to 3.

Later,
Tom