It is time again to upgrade if you are using Fedora. Fedora 11 was released a few days ago and contains some nice enhancements.
For people who can a complete re-install is probably best. One reason for that is the inclusion of ext4 in Fedora11. You won't get the benefit of ext4 unless you do a fresh install or upgrade from ext3 to ext4. If you read the upgrade guide that Fedora produces it recommends not doing an upgrade.
This time around I decided to go with PreUpdate right off the bat and it worked great. Here are the condensed steps. I think this will be the last time I do an upgrade post since they have it down to almost nothing now.
- You have to be at Fedora10 before you try this. If you aren't there follow the steps to get to Fedora10.
- yum clean all
- yum udpate
- preupgrade-cli "Fedora 11 (Leonidas)"
- reboot and wait
It seems like the days of conflicts before upgrades are gone now so that is a good thing. I didn't have to remove anything to make dependencies work out. The only fallout I had from this upgrade was my NVIDIA configuration for xorg got wiped and I had to pull it from backup. So take note to back up your xorg.conf if you have a custom one.
Install PreUpgrade with:
yum install preupgrade
It appears that the above will only work if you are obtaining an IP address via DHCP. A little googling seems to indicate that if you want to use preupgrade-cli with a static IP it must be listed in the command line. (Apparently all of the /etc/syconfig/network-scripts files are completely ignored when upgrading.) This is a bit frustrating since it is a significant departure from the behavior when upgrading with yum.
Hmm, I just tried this and it failed badly. After rebooting, the machine failed to come back. A visit to the data centre showed that it was sitting with a prompt asking which Ethernet interface to use. I didn't actually care!
After hitting return, it ran for a while an then came up with an error message again requiring console access. The only option was reboot and I could envisage myself getting into an infinite loop. However, after the reboot the machine came back into Fedora 10 and I breathed a sigh of relief, relocked the cabinet and went home.
Can we please go back to your old way of doing it? Besides the obvious advantage that it actually works, it also minimises downtime and works remotely. Please don't stop writing the guides that use yum; I miss being able to come here, copy and paste two lines of code and have my machines upgraded, as I have been doing since FC7.
Thanks,
Cliff.
Same issue here as Cliff and Aaron – updating via yum still is really the only safe way to do this on a headless server. I've had about a 50% success rate using preupgrade – and 50% is clearly nowhere near good enough when you don't have access to your server. One of my machines uses eth0 for the internal IP and eth1 for the external – but preugrade assigns the IP address to eth0. Furthermore, when it does work, it requires taking your server offline for approximately 2 hours (at least it did for me) – on a production server, using yum, your server is only offline long enough to reboot it.
So, it's still not automatic enough to use preugrade unless you're using a Fedora desktop system.
PreUpgrade works great when your upgrading from a relatively new Fedora install. Systems which started on Fedora prior FC5 made a very small /boot partition by default (only 30MB).
For these systems Anaconda or Yum is the only way, unless you re-size your /boot partition.
Indeed! Keep writing the Yum upgrade docs, but only if you are doing it :) Obviously we can take previous FC>FC Yum posts and apply a bit of logic to do it on our own.
The benefit that I have had from your site, since FC5, is that you went through the pain and legwork that made me comfortable to do it in production.
Thanks for years of great help with Yum updates.
By the way… if you want to:
yum updateyum clean all
yum clean all
yum update
rpm -Uvh http://mirrors.usc.edu/pub/linux/distributions/fedora/linux/releases/11/Fedora/i386/os/Packages/fedora-release-11-1.noarch.rpm http://mirrors.usc.edu/pub/linux/distributions/fedora/linux/releases/11/Fedora/i386/os/Packages/fedora-release-notes-11.0.0-2.fc11.noarch.rpm
yum -y update
Should get you going. I ran into a problem with Nessus (which I removed and reinstalled after) and MySql (which I removed and reinstalled after). Everything else built just fine.
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Has anyone tried editing /boot/upgrade/ks.cfg and adding –device=eth1 to the network line after preupgrade runs and before rebooting?