[TriLUG] Red Hat 9 upgrade issues

Joseph Tate jtate at dragonstrider.com
Thu Aug 28 15:30:11 EDT 2003


Frye, Matthew wrote:

>I'm getting ready to do a Red Hat 9 upgrade from 7.2 on a test box and it's
>production counterpart.  Can anyone offer suggestions, gotchas to look out
>for, etc.  The reason I ask is because I have noticed that the Red Hat
>Installation Guide is a frail wisp of it's former self.  When I bought the
>5.2 distro in 1998, the book was hefty and chock full of good info.  The RH9
>Installation Guide is a scant 130 pages, mostly of pictures of install
>GUI's.  I don't need a book for that. Particular issues include ext2 to ext3
>migration, libraries, network considerations, etc.
>
>
>  
>
Upgrade to 8.0 first.  There are packages that were replaced in 8.0 (and 
marked as obsoleted by blah), but those packages can't be updated 
straight to 9 (because those obsoleted lines were removed from the 
RPMs).  I can't remember which packages off hand, but check the yum list 
archives for details.  A 7.2 to 8.0 update can be done using yum as can 
a 8.0 to 9 update.  Since you've got a test box though, backup a copy of 
the output from rpm -qa | sort and go for it.  Then do another rpm -qa 
when you're finished with the upgrade to see what's still hanging 
around.  Those packages should be removed before the upgrade takes place 
to make it smooth sailing.  A glance at the RELEASE notes for 8.0 and 9 
should give you a clue of what problem packages to look for.

Ext2 to ext3 can be done as easily as running tune2fs -j on the 
unmounted drive.  Network stuff is the same.  IPtables replaces 
ipchains, but lokkit is still there, and so are ipchains, so if you 
don't want to migrate right away you can.

Joseph

P.S.  If you're running mailman on the 7.2 box, you'll need to do a lot 
more work to get that to work. 
And one more thing, if you're running postgres, make sure you have a 
good pg_dump file of all your data before the upgrade.  Point releases 
of postgres are not binary data file compatible with previous versions.  
I.e. data files from 7.2.x cannot be read by 7.3.x, hence the need for a 
good pg_dump of the data.




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