Remotely upgrading via yum

[Bruno Wolff III]

On Sat, Feb 14, 2009 at 08:14:35 -0800,
  Paul Nowosielski <paulnowosielski at yahoo.com> wrote:
> 
> I have two remote boxes that are in need of upgrading.
> One is running FC6 and the other FC8.
> 
> The FC6 box is running sshd, httpd, pptpd and acts as a firewall
> box.
> 
> The FC8 box is just running mysqld.
> 
> I do not have physical access to these boxes.
> If I am locked out it will be a major problem.
> 
> Does anyone have some advice they can lend me please?
> I was wanting to upgrade with the yum upgrade command but I 
> am wary. I have no experience with it and do not know what to expect.

The kernel upgrade is not going to work seemlessly. If you run mkinitrd on
a kernel that is different than the one you are running on, you might not
get the correct modules include in the initrd file.
I was doing an upgrade over part of that span (FC6 to F9 I think) and had
things fail when I rebooted and had to get physical access to fix things up.
If you have a machine with idential hardware, you should be able to copy
over the initrd file before rebooting.
Even without that there are risks to trying this and you probably want a
backup plan to cover things if something goes awry.