[resend, never saw the first one]
I have a server running f19 (don't ask). It is heavily customised so I prefer to not do a fresh install of f26 and reconfigure everything.
I am reading the upgrade guide at https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Upgrading?rd=Upgrade which says (Upgrading from End of life releases). "If you have Fedora 20 or earlier, you will have to perform at least part of the upgrade with bare yum. You can either use that method to upgrade to Fedora 21 or later" My plan is to do this f19 -> f21 (yum) following https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Upgrading_Fedora_using_package_manager f21 -> f26 (DNF system upgrade)
I suspect that attempting to go directly to f26 may be a bridge too far.
I will check and clean the system before/after each step.
Beyond the listed "common problems", is there any reason to not follow this path? Is there a better way?
TIA
On Thu, 7 Sep 2017 22:03:15 +1000 Eyal Lebedinsky fedora@eyal.emu.id.au wrote:
[resend, never saw the first one]
I have a server running f19 (don't ask). It is heavily customised so I prefer to not do a fresh install of f26 and reconfigure everything.
I am reading the upgrade guide at https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Upgrading?rd=Upgrade which says (Upgrading from End of life releases). "If you have Fedora 20 or earlier, you will have to perform at least part of the upgrade with bare yum. You can either use that method to upgrade to Fedora 21 or later" My plan is to do this f19 -> f21 (yum) following https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Upgrading_Fedora_using_package_manager f21 -> f26 (DNF system upgrade)
I suspect that attempting to go directly to f26 may be a bridge too far.
I will check and clean the system before/after each step.
Beyond the listed "common problems", is there any reason to not follow this path? Is there a better way?
I think this will be a nightmare. You are going through five versions without active repositories, and with all the orphaned packages (which might include libraries you need), the name changes, the structural changes, etc.
Is there any way that you can install the new server in parallel with the existing server? That is, carve out some room on the hard drive and do a fresh install of f26. Or purchase a new drive, install it on the server system, and do a fresh install there. Then you have a working backup to fall back to if f26 is too much to deal with at any time. And, you have the customized version still there to map into the new version, as you discover discrepancies over time and at your leisure. Good opportunity to document all that customisation, too. :-)
Failing that, could you clone the existing f19 server installation to another system and do a test upgrade run on the clone before risking your production server? If the test upgrade works, you could then just rsync back to your production server, and be in business again. Well, there would be some tidying up to do in the boot process (fstab, grub.conf, etc.), but everything else should just work. And if it fails, you've dodged a bullet.
There would have to be a *lot* of difficult and obscure customisation before I would consider going the path you are thinking of. And it is very risky if the server is at all critical.
On 09/07/2017 05:03 AM, Eyal Lebedinsky wrote:
[resend, never saw the first one]
I have a server running f19 (don't ask). It is heavily customised so I prefer to not do a fresh install of f26 and reconfigure everything.
I am reading the upgrade guide at https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Upgrading?rd=Upgrade which says (Upgrading from End of life releases). "If you have Fedora 20 or earlier, you will have to perform at least part of the upgrade with bare yum. You can either use that method to upgrade to Fedora 21 or later" My plan is to do this f19 -> f21 (yum) following https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Upgrading_Fedora_using_package_manager f21 -> f26 (DNF system upgrade)
I suspect that attempting to go directly to f26 may be a bridge too far.
I will check and clean the system before/after each step.
Beyond the listed "common problems", is there any reason to not follow this path? Is there a better way?
You're going to spend a lot of sleepless nights making a leap of seven versions. You're switching kernel structures (from a 3.9.x series to a 4.12.x series), massive glibc, openssl and other library upgrades, startup script changes, network changes, package deprecations and replacements, program replacements. A veritable cornucopia of things. Hoo, boy!
You should try it on a clone of the server if at all possible. Failing that, make DANGED sure you have a COMPLETE backup of the server because I can almost guarantee you are going to have massive problems. Your best option is a fresh F26 install and going through the customization process for what you're doing again. I truly think you'll have far fewer problems doing that than trying to drag a 3-year old system into a current state. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- - Rick Stevens, Systems Engineer, AllDigital ricks@alldigital.com - - AIM/Skype: therps2 ICQ: 226437340 Yahoo: origrps2 - - - - Hard work has a future payoff. Laziness pays off now. - ----------------------------------------------------------------------
Allegedly, on or about 7 September 2017, Eyal Lebedinsky sent:
I have a server running f19 (don't ask). It is heavily customised so I prefer to not do a fresh install of f26 and reconfigure everything.
In my experience, you'll spend far more time trying to do what you want (install several updates, try to get things to carry over from one version to the next without major failures due to changes between versions, trying to carry on using software that you use but no-long exists, etc), than installing a fresh new version on another disc or partition, then copying old data and configurations into the new system.
Even if nothing goes wrong, the time involved in several system updates isn't insignificant.
For what it's worth, I still have a FC4 server, it does what I need it to do, it's isolated on a LAN, no point in changing it. But the other things around it are kept much closer to the current release.
On 07/09/17 22:03, Eyal Lebedinsky wrote:
[resend, never saw the first one]
I have a server running f19 (don't ask). It is heavily customised so I prefer to not do a fresh install of f26 and reconfigure everything.
I am reading the upgrade guide at https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Upgrading?rd=Upgrade which says (Upgrading from End of life releases). "If you have Fedora 20 or earlier, you will have to perform at least part of the upgrade with bare yum. You can either use that method to upgrade to Fedora 21 or later" My plan is to do this f19 -> f21 (yum) following https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Upgrading_Fedora_using_package_manager f21 -> f26 (DNF system upgrade)
I suspect that attempting to go directly to f26 may be a bridge too far.
I will check and clean the system before/after each step.
Beyond the listed "common problems", is there any reason to not follow this path? Is there a better way?
TIA
This report is just for the record, in case someone as lazy as myself faces a similar predicament.
The responses I got all say "do not do that, it will be a big pain". While I expect this to be the case, the number of customizations means a major pain trying to reapply from scratch. I do not even remember all the changes, this system started around 2000? maybe earlier.
I looked at my upgrade history and could see that on another machine I already kept up: 19->22 22->24 24->26 so I decided to try the same here. I took a full clonezilla backup of the f19 system...
I now completed the first step, which I expect is the more difficult. Yes, I had to deal with many issues, like post upgrade conflicts, mysql->mariadb, out-of-kernel module not building, about 40 .rpm{save,new}, syslogd messages change (I scrape some),... but it was all sorted out in about 4 hours of careful attention. After all, is there a better way to spend a Saturday?
I will see if all is well for a few more days before attempting the next steps. The next issue for me will be MythTV 0.27->0.28 upgrade at some point.
After all is done I will need to deal with the leftover fluff, like orphans etc.
cheers
On 09/11/2017 02:00 AM, Eyal Lebedinsky wrote:
I looked at my upgrade history and could see that on another machine I already kept up: 19->22 22->24 24->26 so I decided to try the same here. I took a full clonezilla backup of the f19 system...
In fact, it is doable, but I personally prefer to never skip releases. I don't remember if the N->N+2 upgrade path is still declared supported, but even if it is, I consider it unreliable (how much testing could have that got?)
The biggest hurdle when you do this upgrade marathons is that if you have additional repositories (e.g. rpmfusion), old versions of the repositories have been deleted. In that case the best option is to remove the problematic packages, take note of their names and add again them at the end. They are not-critical by definition.
Installation from scratch is too often advised. I got a Fedora 3 up to Fedora 25, during 12 years. (it also went from i386 to x86_64, the famous "impossible" upgrade)
Regards.
Just an FYI, for anyone else doing a long upgrade. It is a pain but can be done, more pain if your system is customised.
On 11/09/17 10:00, Eyal Lebedinsky wrote:
On 07/09/17 22:03, Eyal Lebedinsky wrote:
[resend, never saw the first one]
I have a server running f19 (don't ask). It is heavily customised so I prefer to not do a fresh install of f26 and reconfigure everything.
I am reading the upgrade guide at https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Upgrading?rd=Upgrade which says (Upgrading from End of life releases). "If you have Fedora 20 or earlier, you will have to perform at least part of the upgrade with bare yum. You can either use that method to upgrade to Fedora 21 or later" My plan is to do this f19 -> f21 (yum) following https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Upgrading_Fedora_using_package_manager f21 -> f26 (DNF system upgrade)
I suspect that attempting to go directly to f26 may be a bridge too far.
I will check and clean the system before/after each step.
Beyond the listed "common problems", is there any reason to not follow this path? Is there a better way?
TIA
This report is just for the record, in case someone as lazy as myself faces a similar predicament.
The responses I got all say "do not do that, it will be a big pain". While I expect this to be the case, the number of customizations means a major pain trying to reapply from scratch. I do not even remember all the changes, this system started around 2000? maybe earlier.
I looked at my upgrade history and could see that on another machine I already kept up: 19->22 22->24 24->26 so I decided to try the same here. I took a full clonezilla backup of the f19 system...
I now completed the first step, which I expect is the more difficult. Yes, I had to deal with many issues, like post upgrade conflicts, mysql->mariadb, out-of-kernel module not building, about 40 .rpm{save,new}, syslogd messages change (I scrape some),... but it was all sorted out in about 4 hours of careful attention. After all, is there a better way to spend a Saturday?
I will see if all is well for a few more days before attempting the next steps. The next issue for me will be MythTV 0.27->0.28 upgrade at some point.
After all is done I will need to deal with the leftover fluff, like orphans etc.
I waited one week, dealing with small issues (mostly my scripts needing adjustments), then proceeded with upgrading f22 -> f24. I could not get my TV tuners to work now, and the out-of-kernel driver needs substantial work, so decided to follow with f24 -> f26 upgrade two days later. The tuners still do not work and I continues with two USB tuners while seeking help on the linux-media list.
These last two upgrades were easier than the first, most of the work was dealing with .rpm{new,save} files. One issue I had (f24 and f26 upgrades) was running, as suggested in the upgrade doco. as a pre-update step:
$ sudo rpmconf -c INFO:rpmconf:Seaching through: /etc INFO:rpmconf:Seaching through: /var at this point I waited 20 minutes with no output so I killed it and proceeded with the upgrade.
This was a week ago and so far the system seems to work well. I will stay up-to-date with upgrades from now on...
cheers