[CentOS-devel] centos 6 to 7 upgrade tool report

To David Mansfield,

My name is Bert, I'm on the Centos-Doc mailing list and I've been doing a
bit of further write up on the C6.5 -> C7 upgrade process - basically on
how to avoid common problems and pitfalls. In other words, give the user
the best experience possible. I've been doing a fair bit of experimenting
before I go ahead and "put up a bunch of suggested ways of doing things to
avoid problematic upgrades" and would like to share what I've learnt so
far, and ask for some more info.

Regarding issue #1:
I too did an upgrade on that had an NTFS partition (was for dual-boot
Windows 2008R2).  I commented out the mountpoint in  /etc/fstab BEFORE
doing the upgrade (as removing ntfs3g would obviously cause mount to
complain it didn't know about the partition, and there's no FUSE add-ons in
the upgrade image kernel) and that avoided any problems for me.  It is
helpful to know from your experience that the upgrade process ended up in
an emergency shell.  This will scare some people, so I will be adding a
specific note about checking for mount points (specifically that use FUSE
add-ons) and a suggestion to comment them out of /etc/fstab before running
the preupgrade advisor.

I suggest commenting them out and unmounting before running the advisor
because (from what I gather) the tool scans and any all mount points
collecting a list of files, which wastes time on the NTFS partition. You
wouldn't expect someone to install Linux-related libraries or executables
on their NTFS partition... though you never know.
One system of mine also had a md RAID6 array, which I unmounted and
commented out for the same reasons above.

After the upgrade, yum isntall ntfs-3g went as expected, and un-commenting
the mountpoint got it mounting again.
I'm glad that worked for you in the end.

Perhaps there are issues with automount that you were encountering prior to
the upgrade.  With the new

Regarding issue #2:
My write-up basically guides the user through removing (read as exorcising
if you'll pardon the expression) anything X Window System and Gnome related
before running the upgrade advisor (at least for the last time).
I include the X window system packages because there have been a few
changes that I suspect would lead to a "bad experience".  Some preferences
seem to have been brought across after a re-install once running C7.

There was a couple of tricks I did before the upgrade.
1. Change to runlevel 3 so the GUI doesn't start up straight after the
upgrade.  (i.e. get to a text-only shell) so we can re-install our GUI
aftewards.
2. Removed X, Gnome and MESA packages.

I had disabled NetworkManager and for the interfaces in the ifcfg scripts
so I can't comment on NM-related issues but there were a few niggles after
the upgrade.

Post upgrade...

yum groups mark convert
to fix the group package assignment changes between C6 and C7.

yum groups install "GNOME Desktop" "Graphical Administration Tools"
to install GNOME again... It's no longer "yum groupinstall ....."

This more/less got GNOME up and running again for me  (via VNC server)

Once in GNOME, use the package maanger to install anything else.

/etc/inittab is no longer relevant.  Use
ln -sf /lib/systemd/system/graphical.target
/etc/systemd/system/default.target
to get X and your window manager starting up by default.

Network manager:
Was starting again by default.   Once I got around that, and switching over
to fiewall-cmd (from plain IPTABLES) and setting up an appropriate zone, my
networking has been fine.

May I ask, why did you choose to install MATE?  Could you not get GNOME
working?
Can anyone else comment on NM?  (before and after)

Cheers,
Bert

------------------------------

Message: 5
Date: Fri, 26 Sep 2014 10:00:15 -0400
From: David Mansfield <centos at dm.cobite.com>
To: centos-devel at centos.org
Subject: [CentOS-devel] centos 6 to 7 upgrade tool report
Message-ID: <5425716F.5080402 at dm.cobite.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8; format=flowed

Hi All,

I used the upgrade tool on a centos 6.5 fully-updated system, used as a
graphical workstation with GDM and gnome2.

Before going into details, I want to thank the CentOS team for all the
hard work over the years, and especially the top-notch effort to get C7
out, and kudos to the individuals getting the upgrade tool to work too.
I feel spoiled.

Back to the story:

The system had significant use of 3rd party repositories.

After I ran the pre-upgrade tool, I used the report of "unsigned"
packages (which includes the source repo in the report, which is very
useful) to remove all of these packages before update.

I ran the tool again and was satisfied that the list of inplace upgrade
risks was acceptable and ran the update.

Issue#1:
The system upgraded and rebooted to the emergency recovery shell. This
was because an NTFS partition could not be mounted (ntfs-3g not
installed by default during upgrade for some reason). This was somewhat
a problem for the user before the upgrade, so I cannot be 100% sure that
mounting this a boot was always working 100% before.

Solution#1
I commented it from fstab and rebooted - 1st problem solved (see Issue#4
below).

Issue#2:
The system booted to a black screen with a movable mouse cursor - GDM
not working.

I tried a bunch of things - uninstalling GNOME stuff, re-installing,
installing a bunch of package groups.  This one had me stumped for quite
a while.

Solution#2
Ultimately, the solution was (I believe) that some modifications in
/etc/pam.d needed to be merged from the .rpmnew files.

On this system, I don't believe the pam.d configuration had been
modified from defaults, so I copied the .rpmnew files over (beware: this
can be dangerous) and voila!

Issue#3:
I installed MATE Desktop from epel, and things looked good except that
NetworkManager wasn't running:

Solution#3:
service NetworkManager start
chkconfig NetworkManager on

Issue#4:
Back to the NTFS volume not mounting.

Solution#4:
I installed ntfs-3g packages and everything mounts fine through
nautilus, which is all the user needs.

Now everything I could test is working, spice client, Citrix client,
google-chrome, vlc, rhythmbox playing mp3s, handbrake (thanks "nux"
again), VPN etc.

Hope this helps, I was going to update the wiki, but there's no edit button!

--
Thanks,
David Mansfield
Cobite, INC.
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