[OT] Upgrading from RH73 to FC2

[MW Mike Weiner (5028)]

On Behalf Of Thomas Cameron
On Fri, 2005-05-27 at 14:32 -0400, MW Mike Weiner (5028) wrote:
> This may sound like a silly question, but i feel compelled to ask it 
> anyway. OK, i have *several* rh73 servers in my environment, that i 
> need to migrate to fc2.

Why FC2?  It is end of life.  Why not wait a couple of weeks and use
FC4?

> OK, not a real major deal, but what i was thinking was to build an 
> internal yum repo (for updates, etc) and also put the
> fc2 install base on this box so i can do nfs installs, etc. 

You can do this, it is easy.  Just put your Yum repo in one directory
structure and the directory structure off the FC CDs in another.  Share
them via NFS or FTP or HTTP.

> Now, here is
> where my silly thinking/question comes in. Is it possible to use this 
> "repository" setup but also read in say an anaconda-kickstart file? I 
> mean without really doing kickstart? And, if not, which i suspect is 
> the answer, what is the best way to take this yum repo box and turn it

> into a Kickstart server so i can do remote upgrades? I would rather 
> not have to manually do >400 servers via yum from rh73 to fc2...

Without stretching too hard, I can imagine a script which will push the
appropriate kernel and initrd.img out to each machine, modify lilo.conf,
run /sbin/lilo and reboot.  The lilo.conf file would pass a URL to the
install kernel for the ks.cfg file, and upgrade the machine hands-free.

> Any ideas would be graciously welcome.
> Michael Weiner

More info would be helpful - are all 400 servers identical, or close to
identical?

Thanks for the response Thomas, the reasoning for FC2 not 4 is simply,
fc2 is production ready (at least for me) and I need to begin the
upgrades as soon as possible. Once they are at fc2, itr rather trivial
to do a yum update to fc4 if that's desirable, I have tested that and it
works fairly well. As for the more info, well yes all 400 are basically
the same, 2U Boxx boxes with Intel 440GX Mb's dual PIII and 1G RAM, some
are hot swap, some arent, Adaptec SCSI controller, and same Intel 10/100
NIC. So hardware wise they are REALLY quite similar in nature. 

I can do an NFS install FROM my yum repo just fine, that seems to be the
easy piece of this exercise - now time to learn more about KS. I have
been wanting to build a KS server for sometime (~5 years now) but havent
really had time, I have had to image all 750 boxes using
DD/Ghost/g4u/etc and have managed pretty well for the past 5 years. Now
its time to get more serious about mass imaging, as I am a thousand
miles away from the datacenter - I need this to be fairly brain-less -
so a NOC'ling can do the job with little intervention.

Michael Weiner