[CentOS] Upgrading FC2 to CentOS 5.* - anyone second this? - general report

Sun Jun 3 18:07:57 UTC 2012
Ross Walker <rswwalker at gmail.com>

On Jun 3, 2012, at 12:55 PM, "Max Pyziur" <pyz at brama.com> wrote:

>> On Wednesday, May 30, 2012 02:56:24 PM Max Pyziur wrote:
>>> My hope is to upgrade; that way I don't have to change/specify partition
>>> topology, and hopefully only minimally adjust the existing
>>> configurations.
>> 
>> I have tried this type of upgrade before; I have not had it go well for
>> the most part.  The only way I'd try to do an FC2 to C5 upgrade is by
>> incrementally upgrading up to FC4 or FC5 using install media, then boot
>> the C5.8 install media with 'upgradeany'.  It may break things very badly.
> 
> Just to advise the general readership. I downloaded iso's for FC3, FC4,
> FC5 DVD install discs, and their accompanying rescue CDs.
> 
> The machine under consideration is old by contemporary standards (a
> PIII-1400 w/ 1.5GB RAM, and three discs, one 2TB in size generally used to
> store backups.
> 
> The FC2->FC3->FC4-FC5 upgrades were done in about three hours; the time
> was split between checking the integrity of the DVDs and CDs and the
> upgrade. Today, I did the FC5->CentOS5.8 upgrade.
> 
> In each phase, the machine booted and functioned.
> 
> I recognized the postgresql issue you mention further in your posting;
> I've been through something like that several times, so I know how to work
> through it.
> 
> All-in-all, this has been easy; nothing like the FC14-FC15 DVD upgrade on
> my desktop that froze that I did two weeks ago (there, I spent a very
> large amount of time unraveling dependency issues and package
> duplications). I hope to do other FC upgrades in the spirit of being
> current, but I anticipate that it won't be as easy as the FC2 -> CentOS5.8
> has been so far.
> 
> I recognize that most of the comments were from sysadmins, more involved
> in managing server farms, and steeped in that knowledge/experience base.
> 
> Much thanks to thoughtful comments and cautions,


You might want to crawl /etc, /bin, /sbin, /usr and /var for files not under management and see if you have anything left over.

I might use find here,

# find /etc -type f -exec rpm -qf \{\} \; -print

Of course the rpm command should be tweaked so it it just returns an error code if the file isn't in the database instead of any output and have find -print the path so you can redirect the output to a file.

Remember not all files not under management are orphan files, so you will need to use some knowledge to figure out which you can rm.

-Ross