[CentOS] Re: Upgrade RedHat 9 to Fedora

Wed Aug 3 16:05:27 UTC 2005
sudo Yang <sudoyang at gmail.com>

On 8/3/05, Phil Schaffner <Philip.R.Schaffner at nasa.gov> wrote:
> On Wed, 2005-08-03 at 10:26 -0400, Ugo Bellavance wrote:
> > sudo Yang wrote:
> 
> Gotta ask - is "sudo" a proper name or a nickname?

Just a nickname.
 
> > > What would be the easiest way to upgrade 2000 servers from RedHat 9 to
> > > Fedora or RedHat Enterprise/CentOS?  Also, 1/2 of these systems have 1
> > > TB data partition that cannot be destroyed.
> > >
> > > Would an upgrade option work via Kickstart?
> 
> That would be my guess, but I've never dealt with anything close to that
> magnitude of problem.
> 
> > Wow, are you working for Google? :).
> >
> > You should tell us about applications that run on it.
> 
> Also curious.
> 
> > Is a backup of the 1 TB partition possible?
> > Is downtime possible for 1 server at the time?
> >
> > I would recommend against fedora and tell you to go with CentOS (and
> > maybe send a little donation/offer mirror).  You'll thank yourself for
> > the long life of updates and stability.
> 
> I STRONGLY agree.  Would not even consider Fedora for this large an
> operation.  It's a nice platform to play with, but I wouldn't want to
> bet my livelihood on a "perpetual Beta" like FC.  Please report your
> experiences when you make the move.

We rely heavily on ReiserFS.  Unfortunately, RedHat Enterprise and
CentOS do not support it.  We started out with RedHat 6.x then 7.1
which does not support any journaling file system at all.  We had to
add ReiserFS support ourselves, so I guess we could do the same here. 
I know CentOS has an unsupported kernel that supports ReiserFS,
unfortunately it's not integrated into Anaconda for automated
kickstart installation.

Why ReiserFS, it's more convenient and we've found it to work better
with large file systems.  These features are extremely useful in
ReiserFS: dynamic inode creation, negligible time to create file
system of any size, large file and filesystem support, no mandatory
fsck (ext3 forces you to do this once in a while, unless you remember
to reset it before rebooting).  When ReiserFS 4 reaches maturity,
we're planning to switch to it (atomic operations, metadata
journaling, ... nice :).

 
> Phil
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> CentOS mailing list
> CentOS at centos.org
> http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
>