Upgrade from F15 to F17

gurutech · #1 24th May 2012, 03:22 AM

I'm sure this has been asked before, but I did a quick search and didn't see anything, so I thought I would ask...

I have an F15 "server" running web services, php, mysql, essentially "LAMP", but also running "Webmin", FTP, and a couple other "not part of a standard install" (such as Samba, NFS).

If I upgrade to F17 through the "preupgrade" process, how much of this configuration will I have to reconfigure from scratch, and how much will retain its current settings? I held off on upgrading to F16 because of this, but I have F17 on a laptop/tablet, and I like how it runs, so I want to upgrade my other Linux machine (server) as well.

I won't be doing anything until the final release of F17, so I know I have some time, but just want to be prepared and know what I will need to back up before I upgrade.

Also, would it be better to upgrade to F16, then to F17, or just go directly to F17?

Cygn · #2 24th May 2012, 12:06 PM

I've upgraded from F15 to F17 beta, and except new grub2 refusing to install by itself on the MBR (I think it's fixed now with grub updates) I didn't had any issues. All my config was kept as it was.

gurutech · #3 24th May 2012, 02:26 PM

How do you fix grub issue?

Cygn · #4 24th May 2012, 02:47 PM

PITA:
mount /boot from live, manually modify menu.cfg to boot F17's kernel and initrd, boot in F17, update grub2 then grub2-install.
I think you won't have this in F17 final though, it was probably a bug that got ironed along the way.

hostace · #5 24th May 2012, 03:56 PM

better F15>F16>F17 than F15>F17.

William Haller · #6 24th May 2012, 05:34 PM

Pay attention to hostace's comment. It's always safer to take them one step at a time.

All you really need to do when done is to do a

find /etc /var -type f -name '*.rpm*'

and look for any .rpmsave, .rpmnew, or .rpmold named files and make sure you do the right thing with them - editing the new features from a .rpmnew into your existing configuration files or dealing with anything that got a default configuration file after renaming your old one to .rpmsave. .rpmold file extensions may have been replaced by .rpmsave at some point.

Generally, if you have a lot of extra packages above the default installed, there are a few packages that you have to remove and reinstall to get a successful upgrade. The yum upgrade works pretty well, but there seem to be some operational limits that it just can't figure out the right sequence to do everything at once.

Personally, I prefer to just do a yum upgrade after manually loading the RPM signing key and adjusting my repos to physically point to the next release. I've never tried preupgrade as various people complain about it and at least with yum it is clear what the system is doing. One of the updates - not sure which but I think it was F16 - had a bug in SSH that would dump the session when it tried to update that package leaving a mess behind if you were doing it remotely over a SSH link. They got that fixed, but keep it in mind if you use a SSH connection.

If you watch what is going on, you can do a live update and just restart a couple of services like apache, named, and the like as the update happens and your total downtime won't be very long from a client point of view.

I'd also wait a couple months after a new release before pushing it to a live server that was doing real world work. F16, for example, continued the replacement of the old Unix/Linux rc.d start structure with systemd which is much worse for figuring out what is going on in a server setting. It may work fine on a desktop that isn't running many services, but it's magically determined order of doing things still has a several minute boot time on my NFS/mail server. It finally works, it is just frustrating.

gurutech · #7 31st May 2012, 12:24 AM

@William, how would I manually edit the RPM repositories to do the yum upgrade? It sounds like that may be the way to go.

William Haller · #8 31st May 2012, 12:55 AM

We run a local repo at the company I work for so we just point the boxes to there, but you can change the

$releasever

to a fixed number like 17 and it should work. Be sure to update the RPM keys - download them from fedora and then do an rpm --import filename.txt

Once the update is done, you can just change it back to $releasever

gurutech · #9 31st May 2012, 01:06 AM

Are there step by step instructions on how to do that? I'm not a "newb", but still pretty "beginner" with most things in Linux.

Thanks!

William Haller · #10 31st May 2012, 01:11 AM

The files are plain text files that you can edit with any text editor as root. They're in /etc/yum.repos.d.

Change the files for any repositories you use - fedora.repo, fedora-updates.repo, possibly fusion-core.repo and fusion-updates.repo or the like.

You can make a copy of them before you start if you want as a backup, but edit the ones in /etc/yum*d.

mkdir /root/oldyum
cd /etc/yum.repos.d
cp -p * /root/oldyum

Then you have a copy to go back to if needed.

Considering the problems various people are reporting, I intend to wait a month or so before going to 17. You could do the upgrade to 16 as a test and make sure everything is working there.

gurutech · #11 31st May 2012, 01:31 AM

so if I go to 16 first, just replace anything referencing 15, with 16? Then run a "yum update" ?

ok, guess not... just checked the repo files, and there's nothing there to edit, just "$releasever" parameters... how do I change that information?

I think I understand now... replace "$releasever" with "16"... correct?

William Haller · #12 31st May 2012, 02:16 AM

Right. You can look on the fedora website for specific instructions for upgrade.

You generally use yum upgrade after changing to 16.

It used to be they would recommend

yum upgrade rpm
yum upgrade yum

but recently these bring in just about everything except the proverbial sink, but you might start there.

With most upgrades if you have a lot of extra packages yum might eventually dump and give up and you might have to manually resolve anything it can't upgrade in one shot. Just keep notes so you can reinstall them.

When done, it's frequently useful to do a yum grouplist and a yum groupinstall for any groups you have in case the distribution added some new packages that aren't loaded as part of an upgrade of an existing package.

It seems a bit tedious at times, but after upgrading from FC1 up on several boxes, you get used to the process.

It's always a good idea to read through the release notes and make sure your bases are covered before the first time. The nice thing about a yum upgrade is it will dump the packages in /var/cache/yum instead of /boot where I guess preupgrade puts thing so you have more room to work.

Always a good idea to remind the new users to do a backup first of all important files - you never know what might happen.

gurutech · #13 31st May 2012, 02:23 AM

I think that's what I'm concerned about the most - backing up my important files... I know what's important (to me), but don't know what files I actually need to back up, or where they are located. I have three hard drives in this machine, two of which are just data, so I know those won't be touched, as long as I don't tell the upgrade process to wipe those drives.... But my main concern is the "boot" drive, which (I believe) contains the /, /boot, /home, and /root partitions.

William Haller · #14 31st May 2012, 02:27 AM

That's what is nice about upgrade - it basically just does nothing more than an update would do. I'm not sure where grub2 came in - I think 15 ->16, and the yum upgrade won't force grub2 on you - you have to do that as an extra step. I did it for 4 boxes according to the fedora instructions and it worked fine. I have one box that is still using the old grub. As long as you meet the basic specs for space and upgrade all the repositories - including fusion, you should have a working system when done. You can do some poking around and when you're comfortable with the results you can reboot and you should be running 16.

gurutech · #15 31st May 2012, 04:11 AM

Updating now to 16. Actually tried preupgrade first - it would install "preupgrade", but would not run it. got an error message.

So I backed up the repos, edited them to force an upgrade to 16, updated rpm and yum, then ran an update - 976 new updates... lol

I noticed there was a line in each of the .repo files saying "gpgcheck=1", so I changed the 1 to a 0, to disable that. The only repos I had were the fedora ones, and livna.org, which I trust.

Only thing I really need to do after the upgrade, after making sure everything still works, is to figure out how to get the sendmail application to send mail on a port other than 25, since my ISP blocks it...