[K12OSN] upgrading k12ltsp

Eric Harrison eharrison at mail.mesd.k12.or.us
Sun Dec 18 20:31:34 UTC 2005


On Sun, 18 Dec 2005, Carl Keil wrote:

> This has me wondering.  Are people actually getting away with booting off the 
> first CD and selecting "upgrade"?  I thought a clean install was really the 
> only way to upgrade - that actual "upgrading" was a sure trip to trouble.  I 
> would soooo like to take the easy way out on this if there's a 90% chance of 
> it working.

There is a 90% chance of it working.  I have about a 100 servers I
maintain, I am constantly doing upgrades.

My recomendation is to do a full back up. *Always* do a full backup (and
test it) before doing an sort of major change to a server.

If you are confident that you have a full, tested backup, you should
feel confident in trying out different ways to upgrade. Worse case you
just restore back to the original state.



The cleanest way to do an upgrade, as others have noted, is just do a
fresh install, re-install your custom applications, and restore your
user data (which you have on a seperate drive, so that is already done).

But with Linux, it is possible to get the equivient by slapping in
the install CD and selecting "upgrade". After the upgrade is done,
I run:

 	yum upgrade

to pull down all of the updated packages (CD are *always* out of date)
and any third-party repository packages that can be upgraded.

I then run:

 	yum list extras

This will list packages that are NOT in any of your repositories. I
then figure out whether or not these extra packages are ok, need a
new version downloaded and installed, or just simply removed.

Finally, I test everything.


Whether or not doing a fresh install or an upgrade is easier or quicker
depends on the state of the system. If you have a plain vanillia
install that has not had extensive modifications, an upgrade should
be trivial. Of course, if you have a plain vanillia install that has
not had extensive modifications, it should also be trivial to do
a fresh install and restore the user data.

If you have a ton of modifications to the base packages, but not a
lot of third-party packages added, an upgrade is likely to be easier.
Many, if not most, of the modifications will be retained.

If you have a ton of third-party software installed, especially if they
are not packaged (i.e. you installed from source), then a fresh install
can be the easier route.

-Eric




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