RH9 to FC2 upgrade?

[jeru]

I'm curious as to what people think of this idea...

I currently have 2 RH9 servers... one that would really bug me to rebuild from scratch, the other is hardly used. Here is a list of what the used one is doing...

Apache
Tomcat 5.0.19
Postfix
dhcpd
bind
samba as PDC
mysql
ftp, ssh, sftp, imap, pop, spamd, sasl and all that
about 25 users and about 10 domains.

All are default RH9 rpm's only upgraded from rhn... (with the exclusion of tomcat of course) I tried to keep it that way for when this type of thing came along. There are some non-standard packages on there that I built as rpm's on a development workstation I had on the side and installed them on the server when they seemed stable enough to use... But I can track them all down to remove them before an upgrade.

This being said, do you think I should just run a RH9 to FC2 upgrade? or do you think I should go through with a full rebuild, or do another box and swap it out? I've never done an upgrade before and don't quite know what to expect from it. I mostly just want to know what other people normally do when they have to move to new releases....

[Ug]

I think you could manage an upgrade as long as you keep it all fairly vanilla. The move from RH9 to FC2 will be a pretty big one.

[foolish]

My guess is that t will work. but you might have some minor issues to work out.

To be safe, try to remove all packages not red hat packages before the upgrade. To list them all, use this command:

rpm -q --qf "%{name} - %{vendor}\n" `rpm -qa` | grep -v "Red Hat, Inc."

Removing these packages will make your system cleaner, and maybe the upgrade smoother. Just a suggestion, it might work just as well if you leave the 3rd party packages.

[Ug]

Like I said, try and make it as vanilla as possible. ;)

[crackers]

Oh, yeah - vanilla is good in this instance. I tried to do an upgrade once on a workstation that had a couple of Ximian packages. The hairball it coughed up was pretty ugly...

[rhardy]

I've done things like this since Redhat 6.2, i.e. I've upgraded boxes from: RH6.2->[...]->RH8->RH9->FC1->FC2

The secret is: use apt-get dist-upgrade --reinstall and don't try to jump two generations at once (i.e. if going from RH9 to FC2 you upgrade from RH9->FC1->FC2.)

You should be prepared to do some perl scripting if you want to do this on a bunch of hosts. We have upgrade process documents and written scripts to do this in house.

[crackers]

That must put on quite a show in the network center! Lots of pretty lights... ;)

[dave-tx]

I did a RH9->FC2 upgrade similar to this one. I also had a custom 2.6.5 kernel that I was using with Openswan IPsec running.

The only hitch I ran in to during the upgrade was getting imap running. Seems FC2 installs cyrus-imapd by default, and I couldn't get that working within a few hours, so I installed the dovecot imap package.