Fedora 3, 4 and 6 - Remote Upgrade Advice?

Bruno Wolff III bruno at wolff.to
Thu Apr 2 16:16:25 UTC 2009


On Thu, Apr 02, 2009 at 10:20:32 -0400,
  Mark Haney <mhaney at ercbroadband.org> wrote:
> Gabriel - IP Guys wrote:
> > Dear All,
> > 
> > Thank you for reading my message. I have to upgrade three linux boxes,
> > that are FC3,4 and 6. Now, the problem that I have is that these
> > machines have other services running on them, and I do not want to break
> > anything.
> > 
> > All three servers are in two collocation facilities, and I believe that
> > the safest method, is to move all services off from the machines, and
> > also remove all software to make the machines as stock as possible. I
> > then plan to run yum upgrade a few times until I'm up to date with the
> > repo, and then follow that with a yum upgrade - rinse, and repeat until
> > I'm at FC8 - I'll wait until 11 is in beta before I move forward to FC9.
> > I would appreciate any help or comments that you have.
> 
> I'm not sure I would do 'yum upgrade'.  But, with the systems being
> remote I don't know what other options there are on systems that old.
> I've got several systems I've upgraded (via media) from FC2 up to F9
> without trouble.

Doing remote yum upgrades has a significant risk of leaving a machine
in a state where it cannot reboot without intention. In particular
some of the mkinitrd stuff doesn't work well when run under a kernel
signicantly different then the one its building an initrd for.
At the very least have a plan for what you are going to do if things
go fubar during the updates.




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