CentOS - May 2012 - Upgrading FC2 to CentOS 5.* - anyone second this?

Greetings,

I *do* still have an FC2 box.

Would anyone second this procedure:
http://www.centos.org/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?topic_id=14052&forum=37&post_id=47945

Thanks.

Max Pyziur
pyz at brama.com

On Fri, May 25, 2012 at 5:03 PM, Max Pyziur <pyz at brama.com>
wrote:
>
> I *do* still have an FC2 box.
>
> Would anyone second this procedure:
>
http://www.centos.org/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?topic_id=14052&forum=37&post_id=47945
>
It might possibly work, but I can't quite imagine why anyone would
want to do it at this point.  Why not back up anything you might want
to keep, install a nice clean Centos 6.x and put back the files you
wanted?

-- 
  Les Mikesell
     lesmikesell at gmail.com

On Wed, May 30, 2012 at 1:51 PM, Reindl Harald <h.reindl at thelounge.net>
wrote:
>
> Am 30.05.2012 20:36, schrieb Les Mikesell:
>> Fedora doesn't support/recommend in-place upgrades across major
>> versions or at least didn't for those versions. ?My experience was
>> that even within a major rev. an update could kill your system.
>
> then you are doing something wrong
Yes, I was running it on an IBM server box that they didn't bother to
test.   Found out much later that the pre-update kernel worked on the
firmware I had installed and the mid-rev update they pushed needed a
firmware bios update to run there.
> am i really the only one who did some hundret successfull
> fedora dist-upgrades in the last 4 years with yum and
> no downtime longer than a normal kernel update?
Probably.  Lots of other things broke in same-major-rev updates until
I gave up at FC6.  Whether any particular machine runs or not has
never been a priority for fedora.  Maybe your hardware matches one of
the developers.   On the other hand, I had 2 4-year uptime runs with a
pre-fedora RH 7.3.  (had to move it once).  For about 6 of those years
it was very busy.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
     lesmikesell at gmail.com

On Wednesday, May 30, 2012 02:56:24 PM Max Pyziur wrote:
> My hope is to upgrade; that way I don't have to change/specify
partition
> topology, and hopefully only minimally adjust the existing configurations.
I have tried this type of upgrade before; I have not had it go well for the most
part.  The only way I'd try to do an FC2 to C5 upgrade is by incrementally
upgrading up to FC4 or FC5 using install media, then boot the C5.8 install media
with 'upgradeany'.  It may break things very badly.

I have had to do this sort of upgrade on SPARC systems running Aurora SPARC
Linux; did a yum-based upgrade up through a few revs, and it was a pain.  I only
did it because install media wasn't already available, and you had to go
backrev to get booting media on my particular box (although the installed system
worked fine once installed).  It is really something I would rather not do
without the preupgrade logic in place, primarily because of non-repo or
third-party repo packages that may or may not be around any more on a newer
repo; for that matter, the Fedora package set in the FC2 days is likely to be
larger than the C5 package set unless you enable third party repos at
install/upgrade time, and that isn't guaranteed to work.

This sort of discussion is in the archives several times, and I think I have put
my particular recipe out there before.  It is recommended by the upstream
vendor, Red Hat, to not do any major version upgrades from one version of EL to
another.  EL4 was based from around FC3, and you are essentially talking about a
direct upgrade from a pre-EL4 to EL5; these two are more different than you
might think. (see
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux#Relationship_to_free_and_community_distributions
for info)

Beyond that, the upgradeany path is probably the least tested of all the
anaconda install paths, and will likely traceback at the worst possible time. 
Upgrades aren't easy (even on Debian/Ubuntu where packages being upgraded
can ask questions and do significant things, unlike in the RPM scriptlet case). 
Preupgrade has failed for me more than it has worked, going through several revs
of Fedora.

Having said all of that, if you analyze your particular package set and you
figure out that all of the packages have identical configs between FC2 (or EL4,
for that matter) and EL5, and that you're not using a package that has had
major changes and upgrades break data (like PostgreSQL; FC2 shipped a
significantly older PostgreSQL than CentOS 5 does, and a major version upgrade
on PostgreSQL requires some special handling), you might be able to get it to
work.

But it will probably take more time to successfully upgrade than it will to do a
fresh install with the same list of packages and a restore of compatible
configurations onto that fresh install.  But, it's your time to waste if you
want to do so.

If you want to see this sort of thing on the MS OS, there is a YouTube video out
there highlighting upgrading through all versions of Windows; the cruft leftover
from Window 1.0, 2.0, and 3.x in a Windows 7 upgraded system is a thing to
behold.

On Wed, May 30, 2012 at 2:54 PM, Reindl Harald <h.reindl at thelounge.net>
wrote:
>
> i will not buy the argument with the hardware because
> i had in the last years 4 notebooks, 3 workstations
> and two different notebooks of my co-developer which
> all done many dist-upgrades well if you know how
> to prepare and cleanup
What does 'last years' mean in kernels?  New kernels have gotten
better.    A google for "FC5 kernel Oops'  has 'about 334,000
results', so I'm not the only one.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
     lesmikesell at gmail.com