On Fri, 2003-11-07 at 10:54, Gary Thornock wrote:
> I'm slowly becoming interested in upgrading my aging server (RH 7.3 +
> SGI XFS).  At the moment, I'm thinking of using Fedora.

I know I said I would run Fedora on servers, but I meant new installs. 
I have to ask, what are you reasons for leaving redhat 7.3?  I run all
my servers on redhat 7.3 currently and there's not reason to change.  I
can even run rh9 2.4.20 kernels on it.  I currently backport all
applicable security patches from rh 9 to 7.3 and even 6.2 (ssh, bind,
etc).  Apache would be an issue, I suppose, but when forced to I'll just
recompile the apache 2.x rpms back to it along with php.  I don't need
KDE 3 and I don't need gnome 2.4, so redhat 7.3 as a server base will
work for the next couple of years for me, dispite redhat's end of life
deal.

> 
> Unfortunately, there isn't an SGI installer for Fedora yet.  So, I'm
> thinking of upgrading the kernel first (SGI does have a kernel RPM
> that will work nicely), and then apt-get dist-upgrade against the
> Fedora apt repository.  I've already done this successfully on
> machines that were previously running RH9 and Fedora beta 2, but I've
> never attempted it on something as old as RH7.3.

I've used apt to upgrade from 7.3 to 9.  It was a little tricky and I
would hesitate to do it on an in production server that was in use.

> 
> How likely is this to work smoothly?

Probably not as smooth as you'd like, but definitely doable if you know
what you're doing and upgrade a few core packages at a time.  I have
successfully done this several times.  I would start with the kernel,
and then glibc, and then rpm and apt.  Then start tackling your server
packages (like main, dns, dhcp or http) one at a time and see how bad
the dependencies are.

Michael


> 
> - Gary
> 
> 
> ps: A couple of notes before someone asks:
> - XFS is required.  I have neither the time nor the "scratch" disk
>   space I would need to convert my existing partitions (~200 GB)
>   to some other filesystem.  Besides, why would I want to?  XFS has
>   been stable, reliable and really fast for quite some time now :)
> - Installing the kernel from an RPM is required in this instance,
>   because, for some reason I've been unable to determine, I have never
>   been able to successfully compile a kernel on this particular
>   machine, either from the Red Hat patched sources or from the "clean"
>   Linus sources, and have it boot.  I have compiled my own kernels
>   plenty of times on other machines, but it just doesn't work on this
>   one.  It's something to do with the motherboard.  Whatever the
>   reason, though, stock kernel RPMs from Red Hat work just fine, and
>   so do the ones from SGI.
> 
> ____________________
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-- 
Michael L Torrie <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>

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