Upgrading from FC2 to FC3

[carl]

Hi all,

If any of you are considering upgradeing to FC3 with apt or yum, you might want to hold off for a bit as there are a few catches:

The introduction of udev. This creates /dev on the fly at boottime. On a VPS it meant it was displaying the error "Unable to open root console". This was due to /dev/console or something else in /dev missing. The fix was to re-create /dev after udev was installed, and then disable udev being loaded in /etc/init.d/rc.sysvinit. If you don't disable udev, it will segfault during startup and cause the VPS to die.

SSH hangs after you give it a password. Not sure why.

Unfortunately I didn't have much time to play around with the VPS in its broken state to see if there were any other problems. We will be doing some trial runs of upgrading FC2 to FC3 in the future though.

- kron

[GermanyJim]

Agreed.

SSH hangs after you give it a password. Not sure why.

Apparently this has to do with /dev/random not existing or something... I think you nailed it with the /dev not existing.

Jim

[dpoon]

I successfully upgraded my VPS from FC2 to FC3 recently using apt. Strictly speaking, it's not a complete upgrade, since I kept my /dev from FC2 instead of going with udev in FC3.

Here's an outline of how I did it. The usual disclaimers apply: make your backups, your results may vary, proceed at your own risk.

1) Install apt-0.5.15cnc6-16.r362.i386.rpm from Fedora Extras 3.

2) Run "apt-get mirror-select". Check that /etc/apt/sources.list.d/mirror-select.list points to Fedora 3 repositories.

3) Remove these lines from Essentials list in /etc/rpmpriorities:
grub hdparm hotplug kbd kudzu setserial udev

4) Create /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/hold.conf with these contents:

RPM
{
Fake-Provides {
"kernel 2.6.10";
"kernel-drm";
"udev 039-10.FC3.6";
};
Hold {
"dev";
}
}


5) Run "apt-shell". In apt-shell, give these commands:

update
dist-upgrade
keep hwdata


Give the "status" command, and check that udev will not be installed. If necessary, use the "keep" command to keep individual packages from being upgraded. When everything looks good, give the "commit" command.

After the upgrade, reboot once. There should be minimal downtime involved. See my caveat about MySQL server not starting (http://forums.rimuhosting.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=88) after the upgrade.

On my VPS, the downloaded RPMs totaled 170 MB. For some reason, a few of my -devel RPMs didn't get upgraded; I had to run "apt-get upgrade" afterwards to pick up the FC3 versions of libtermcap-devel, libxml2-devel, ncurses-devel, readline-devel, and zlib-devel.

Hope you find this useful. Good luck!