On Sat, Aug 16, 2003 at 11:04:16AM +0100, Kevin Passey wrote:
> Is it a big deal upgrading from 7.2 to 9?
Upgrades are tricky things. Conservative practice is to *not* upgrade
to new revisions, but to do a completely new install.
There are two basic cases here:
1) You have made lots of changes to your current installation.
2) You have left your initial installation in mostly its original
state.
If you have made lots of changes, it is tempting to do an upgrade so
as to not lose them. The problem is that the chances of things
breaking are much greater if you have customized things.
For the other case, if you have made few changes to your orginal
installation, the upgrade is more likely to work well, but the need to
do an update is much less and you might as well do a fresh install.
If you can install from scratch, it is better to do so. If your data
is in your home directories and everything else is stock, then backing
up your home directories, installing from scratch, then restoring your
data files, works well. Note that if you only restore your data files
and not every file from your home directory, things will work better.
Many of the files and directories that begin a "." are best taken from
the installation's default. To help see how you have changed your
configuration compare /etc/skel with the corresponding files in your
home directory.
If you want to try an upgrade, backup files and directories you care
about, and give it a whirl. If it fails you can still do a
from-scratch installation. And let us know how it goes!
Another suggestion: if you have the disk space (and big disks are
cheap these days) install everything. It comes in handy. Speaking of
disks, doing a new OS install is a good opportunity to upgrade to a
bigger disk, but if you do it, I suggest putting in a pair of
identical disks in a bootable software raid 1 configuration. (The Red
Hat installer knows how to do that.) A raid 1 array is faster than a
single disk (if you put them on different controllers), and more
reliable (one disk can die with no loss of data).
Finally, now is a good time to start keeping a configuration log.
Create file file in /root and call it, say, "configlog.txt", and keep
notes in it. Every time you make a system configuration change, make
a note of it, including the date. Because only root can make system
changes, keeping this file in root's home directory seems sensible.
-kb
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