On Thu, 2 Oct 2003, Norman Zhang wrote: > > As for the "safety" of upgrading, I prefer clean installs that retain > > /home, which I keep on a separate partition for exactly that reason. I > > also back up /etc and certain subdirs of /var before the install, to > > be able to quickly get the new system's settings and data as I want > > them. > > Again thanks for your suggestions. I too prefer a clean install. But I > have never done an upgrade by retaining /home partition or other > volumes. So if I just format and reinstall 9.1/9.2 on other volumes, > will the data on /home be retained?
Yes, if you make "/home" the mount point for that partition *and* are careful to not include that partition among the ones to be formatted. I usually do not tell the installer _anything_ about my /home partition, preferring to let it set up a default /home dir on the root partition at install time; later on, I will delete its contents (but not the directory itself), and edit /etc/fstab to mount my /home partition in their place, once I have determined to my satisfaction that I'm keeping that install. That seems to me to be the safest method, even if it is a tad more effort. Either way, you may find that the ownership of the files and dirs within your /home partition do not align properly with the users and groups in your new installation; this is because such information is stored within the FS in numeric form (the UID and GID numbers, not their text names), and unless the users were all created in exactly the same order in both instances, they will not match up. How to best handle this will hinge on how many users are on the box; if just a few, the "usermod" and "groupmod" commands can adjust the UIDs and GIDs, respectively, to the correct ones (the ones that correspond to the right existing dirs). For larger setups, pasting *just* the user-specific lines from the old versions into the new of the folowing three files is probably the best way to do it: /etc/passwd /etc/shadow /etc/group Be careful not to change any UIDs or GIDs for any system users (like sys, adm, disk, mail, nobody, etc. etc.), and to limit your edits entirely to data that pertains to users of the "living-and-breathing" variety. :) It should go without saying, don't mess with those three files while any user other than root - including you! - is logged in; this is all stuff you get squared away *before* you return the system to production status. > /home is running XFS (I'm not sure if this related), will the new kernel > recognized the older XFS volume? I don't see why not, but I'm no authority on XFS and the current state of the kernel's support for it. Generally, newer kernel versions will have no trouble with older filesystem formats, but the reverse can be problematic. As the kernels in 9.1 and 9.2 are merely newer entries on the same 2.4.X tree, I would anticipate that the transition should be reasonably smooth. > Also I'm running software RAID on my disks. Are there other things that > I should look for? Again, I'm not a RAID guru, and have never done an "upgrade-install" on a system that used it, so hopefully someone else can help you on this point; I will venture a guess that as long as you can identify the array to the installer properly in all respects, you *should* be okay ... but don't consider that answer a definitive one, please. I'd suggest trying to find someone who's actually done that at least once, and ask them about it. :) -- Bill Mullen [EMAIL PROTECTED] MA, USA RLU #270075 MDK 8.1 & 9.0 The engineer is neither optimist nor pessimist. He sees the proverbial half-full/empty glass and says, "The glass is twice as big as there is any need for it to be."
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