Geeky Ramblings

Yep, it happened again … about this time last year I was trying to upgrade my servers to Fedora Core 6 and ran into some problems.

Well, I decided it was time to upgrade to Fedora 8 … and, since I have time off, I figured this was a fine time to do it again.

Bad move.

Of course, in retrospect … there never would have been a good time to do the upgrade, based on the problems I encountered. At least I know my backup procedure is fairly good now.

I had been planning this upgrade for weeks … everything was set. In fact, the first half of the upgrade went smooth as silk. I upgraded the main web server (gondor) to Fedora 8 and it went pretty nicely. Only two issues, both of which were solved after a little research.

This gave me the confidence to proceed to upgrade Rivendell to Fedora 8.

I started the upgrade by booting from the CD so I could install Fedora from the DVD ISO image I had on a USB hard drive. Problem is, the system wouldn’t boot this way.

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Well, I finally got my Linux systems upgraded … both Rivendell & Gondor got upgraded to Fedora Core 6 this weekend.

There were a few minor glitches … but nothing that couldn’t be handled.

One thing that was kind of annoying is the fact that the Apache config (httpd.conf) was replaced on both servers (the original was backed up to a ‘rpmsave’ file). This, in itself, wasn’t that big a deal … but I wasn’t expecting it.

I have an idea for a good open source project … that could be incorporated into new distribution releases … an “Upgrade Impact Analysis” tool. It would evaluate your existing configuration, compare to what is known about a new distribution, and tell you what config files could be used without modification and which files would have to be reworked.

Another problem I had, which had me worried, was the fact that I couldn’t get ClamAV to rebuild. After a bit of research, I found that my linker configuration file ‘ld.so.conf’ had a ‘/usr/i486-linux-libc5/lib’ listed. This has to be left over from one of my older Redhat installs. The files in that directory are timestamped April 15th 1999. To be honest, I’m shocked I was able to build anything with that old code in the linkers configuration. Luckily, simply commenting that line out fixed the problem.

So far everything seems to be working OK, so I’m cautiously optimistic.