[lug] Why Not Upgrade? (Was: Forwarding or routing question)

[Tkil]

>>>>> "Mike" == Michael Deck <deckm at cleansoft.com> writes:

Mike> Or, that in upgrading some of the configuration changes will be
Mike> stomped and I won't know it.  I could backup /etc and /var but
Mike> where else is config stored?

note that some configuration changes will have to be made, no matter
how painless redhat makes the upgrade process.

i was in a similar situation; i had RH5.1 + lots of my own packages,
and i wanted to upgrade just XFree86.  well, the new XF86 uses the
font server, which in turn uses chkconfig (this is all after i
mostly-successfully installed glibc2.1 on top of the 5.1 libc5).
after i tried my best to do all that, the system was pretty well
fried.  so i did an "emergency" full install of 6.0, on top of the
existing install.  shockingly enough, it actually more or less worked, 
although the machine definitely felt flaky.

i ended up saving off /home, /var, /etc, and /usr/local to CDRW, then
repartitioned, reformatted, and reinstalled.  the box works great now.

i thought about going through my entire filesystem and seeing which
files were assigned to RPMs and which weren't -- the thought being
that i would only have to conserve those files that didn't belong to
any packages.  i never got around to implementing it, but it would be
interesting, i thought...

Mike> What would you say to convince me that there's nothing to fear? 

well, if you do it carefully, there's not *too much* to fear.

my personal recommendation would be to back up the filesystems i
mentioned above to some other media (possibly just another HD; 200USD
is cheap for 20+GB of storage, and you can probably get more if you go 
with a slower disk; for one-off backups, this is probably the cheapest 
route.  CDR/CDRW is nice, but the latter, at least, is *slow*, and
650MB is a bit small for whole-filesystem backups).

then, repartition (if desired), and reinstall.  next, copy back the
stuff you saved, BUT NOT TO THE SAME PLACE.  i put the old contents of
/var into my new filesystem at /var/old, old /etc into /etc/old, and
so on.  then i just went through the setup steps i knew i needed (for
me: passwd/group, name resolution, apache, xntpd, xfree86, xemacs,
mysql, and perl).  i could refer to the old configuration while
keeping any newer facets of the original.  for some of the files,
"diff" helps a lot; i remember using this on the apache config files,
in particular.

there are probably more graceful ways of doing this, and in the future 
i'll pay a lot more attention to where my config files end up.  but
this worked for me, and i had my 6.0+errata machine back in shape
within an evening or two.

t, who just remembered that he should install the latest batch of
errata off krud-1999-10 ...
-- 
Tkil * <URL: http://slinky.scrye.com/~tkil> * hopelessly hopeless romantic.
  "So amplify this little one 	|   She hears as much as she can see
   She's a volume freak       	|   And what she sees, she can't believe."
        -- Catherine Wheel, _Happy Days_, "Judy Staring At The Sun"