[LAU] Upgrading (was Re: Ardour and xrun markers)

[Joe Hartley]

On Tue, 4 Jan 2011 10:30:33 -0600
S C Rigler <riglersc at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Tue, Jan 4, 2011 at 9:35 AM, Arnold Krille <arnold at arnoldarts.de> wrote:
> > The hours spent getting watching one system to
> > upgrade while working with another where much better used then the hours
> > spent
> > setting up a new system with all the small quirks and settings to re-create
> > my
> > needed working environment.
> 
> You didn't mention Fedora.  I speak from experience, particularly from
> upgrading FC8, and by "catastophic" I mean a failure that forces you to
> scrap all efforts to complete the upgrade process and resort to a clean
> installation.   Usually the failure happens after you've wasted a
> significant amount of time and is so frustrating that you will swear off
> ever upgrading a Fedora release again especially if it is for more than 2
> major releases.  FC8 has been end of life for 2 years and a lot has changed
> since then so expect problems.

I've been a RedHat user since RedHat 5 and while I have a few upgrade 
tales of woe, they're ancient history since I came up with a short list 
of best practices for doing them.  I modified them a bit to take into 
account the new preupgrade process but it's all based on the same
strategy - don't mess with the existing installation!  The basic points are:
* always keep /home on a different partition
* use multiple / partitions
* if doing an upgrade, clone the existing / partition to a new one, boot into
  that, then try the upgrade

For a long time I used to have separate partitions for /, /var, /usr, /tmp and so
on, which goes back to the days when UNIX-y systems performed better with the
partitions broken out like that, but that's not been the case for years now.
(Whew.)  Now I keep the whole system under / with /home and /boot separate and
it makes it a snap to be able to boot back into my old installation if I have to,
or mount the old / to recover settings in /etc

-- 
======================================================================
       Joe Hartley - UNIX/network Consultant - jh at brainiac.com
 Without deviation from the norm, "progress" is not possible. - FZappa