On Thu, Oct 25, 2007 at 05:32:46PM +0900, David Christopher Zentgraf wrote: > The situation is as follows: Remote box at our host who offers CentOS > 3 as the most up-to-date OS, unless you pay them an unholy amount of > money for RHEL or Windows licences. Popping in a CD for an upgrade > does not work for us. We can and will have the OS restored to a clean > post-install state prior to updating. I have little intimate > knowledge with CentOS, RPMs or yum, but general good UNIX experience. > I know "live" yum migrations are greatly discouraged, but it seems to > work for people. It _can_ work, although it might be a little messy. I recently did a FC3 -> CentOS 5 "upgrade" remotely. It was a hassle. Lotsa RPM's don't play nice, and I had ended up trying to go from FC3 -> CentOS 4 the first time around which obviously didn't work out too well so I introduced some other issues by doing that (FC3 was the base for RHEL4 / CentOS 4, so there are some versioning conflicts). Ultimately I think I upgraded the mess I made with that to FC4 and then to CentOS 5. :) My best recommendation if you have no other choice is to remove as many RPM's as you can -- get it as bare bones as possible. Point your Yum repo at the new repository and do a yum upgrade and see what errors you come across. Try and resolve, or just remove the offending RPM's. In some cases I would either manually install an RPM to fix a dependancy or rebuilt from an SRPM to add a Provides line at least to get the upgrade going. I didn't keep notes unfortunately on my process, but it did take quite a while. :) Eventually it did work however. YMMV... maybe your colo would set you up with an IP KVM or something temoprarily and you could do your own install? And perhaps a CentOS 3 -> CentOS 4 -> CentOS 5 upgrade would work better. I'm sure others will comment.