Upgrade from FC6 to FC11

[Roberto Ragusa]

Jussi Lehtola wrote:
> 
> The reason is that RHEL 5 is based on Fedora 6, so the upgrade should
> work out smoothly.

This also means I'm almost not really upgrading anything.
FC5->CentOS5 is similar to FC5->F6
(ok, with some backports, I know)

>  Also if you haven't updated the machine so far, it's
> best to update to a distribution that still has many years of support to
> come. The software you have installed manually in FC5 should still work
> in CentOS 5.

I have no manually installed software.
One of the reason to prefer Fedora (possibly a recent one) is that
the software I need has been already properly packaged with high
probability.

> If, on the other hand, you really want to stick with Fedora, I'd do a
> complete reinstall since that is the quickest way to do the upgrade
> (doing 4 upgrades is *really* slow). Besides, that way you get a clean
> system and all of the advantages of the new ext4 file system.

In my specific case, converting the system disks brings no advantage
as they are never really accessed. As regards the data disks instead
(this are fileservers in a rack), I would certainly avoid ext4 for
some time for safety. The data is currently on reiserfs, whose
quality is often estimated a lot worse than the actual thruth.

> If you want to try your luck with the successive upgrades, you still
> might end up with a bit of a broken system, since you will probably have
> to recompile the software you have installed manually. Plus, you might
> end up with some trouble with the upgrades themselves.

I'm actually considering a 5 to 11 upgrade by DVD.
I hate reinstalling.
Doing it in many steps would probably not be much better.
Some initrd issues, rpmsave/rpmnew cleanup etc are not a problem
for me. Graphical login is almost unused, so I don't think something
awful can happen for apps I'm interested in: ntp, samba, netatalk,
cups.

The system is on RAIDed disks, so I will disconnect one of them
as an easy rollback chance in case of unresolvable issues.

The machines are actually not mine and they are used in production.
This is why I'm didn't upgrade in the past (except FC4->FC5).
They work perfectly and the only thing which is pushing me
is the lack of SMART support, which I find unforgivable for a file
server (yes, yes, it is all properly backupped :-) ).

Thanks to everyone giving advice.

-- 
   Roberto Ragusa    mail at robertoragusa.it