4 Jan
2011
4 Jan
'11
5:10 p.m.
On Tue, 4 Jan 2011 10:30:33 -0600
S C Rigler <riglersc(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On Tue, Jan 4, 2011 at 9:35 AM, Arnold Krille
<arnold(a)arnoldarts.de> wrote:
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(a)brainiac.com
Without deviation from the norm, "progress" is not possible. - FZappa
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.