F11 Preview - test with usbkey - upgrade partitions

[Mike Cloaked]

James Laska wrote:
> 
> 
> time.  I'd be curious for your feedback on the current documented
> upgrade method:
> 
> http://docs.fedoraproject.org/install-guide/f10/en_US/ch-upgrading-system.html
> 
> The install-guide also recommends a partitioning scheme intended to
> preserve user data by creating a separate '/home' partition [1].  This
> doesn't quite meet your needs of preserving system configuration data in
> '/etc'.  If you end up repeatedly using the same authentication/user
> 
> 

A couple of points:
The first reference is really to an "upgrade" of an existing system - what I
do is to do a clean install but leave the /opt partition ( and which
contains a subdirectory home that I bind mount to /home in the root
directory. Before configuring the new system a yum update is done to ensure
any post release fixes are in place for the system as a whole.  Also prior
to doing an install of a newer system, I make a backup or /etc and /var and
then run a clean install (which includes reformatting the / partition so it
is really clean) rather than an upgrade.  

After that is complete the root partition contains a virgin installed
system, and in the past I have then manually taken the user lines from the
backup copies in /etc/passwd, /etc/group /etc/shadow and /etc/gshadow and
therefore restored the user login data.  Then I bind mount the home
directory from the /opt subdirectory to /home in the root partition and add
a line to fstab to make it permanent.

Then I go through the config files for ntp, named, dhcp etc etc as necessary
copying back the configs from the backup files that were made before the the
install.

When I went to F10 from F9 I decided to do things a little differently since
there were a lot of changes to KDE so I did not want the old KDE 3.5 configs
lying around in the user areas, so I allowed the system to create new user
areas with their /home directories in the root partition, and then copied
these to new areas in the /opt partition (this also allowed the newer
password hash method to be in place and so enhancing security!) - and
tediously copied the rest of the user area files to the new home directories
as well as things like the Firefox and Thundebird profile info into the new
home directory areas.

So an "upgrade" using a clean install does take some time - but it
presumably results in a lower risk of problems appearing compared to running
a simple yum upgrade - no doubt others will relate their own experiences in
this kind of change?  I had not though about storing passwords centrally
since my use is mainly machines with only up to three or four users, and
sometimes only a single user apart from root.

However I would be interested in hearing how others achieve their change to
newer versions of Fedora?
-- 
View this message in context: http://www.nabble.com/F11-Preview---test-with-usbkey-tp23311298p23315885.html
Sent from the Fedora Test List mailing list archive at Nabble.com.