Well, the upgrade to Fedora 16 puked last night, and the server wouldn’t boot, so I rolled it back to Fedora 15 using the last saved image.  (THIS is why you need to backup BEFORE you attempt an upgrade.)  Initially, I thought that this was slick.  Everything seemed to work: web server, blogs, etc., ftp and ssh access, as well as the stream.  However, I have spent the WHOLE day in dependency HELL.  Probably caused by being forced to skip F16, heh.  More on that later, as I will append this post with some specifics.  I finally got YumEx upgrading all the packages without errors, and as soon as that’s done, I will happily image this box again, and push towards Fedora 18.

 VNC Screen capture.

Well, who said the road was going to be an easy one?  This is what I got when I logged into the server.  Upon checking over the driver and hardware, I discovered that it was using the intel driver, and that was correct, but it was set to 800×600.  Easy fix, I just set it to 1024×768, and got here:

  VNC Screen capture.

These past 20 years of using Linux are really paying off, heh.  I was really surprised that the Ethernet interface started UP, and that the stream was still streaming, as were the request pages.  However, CRAB blog was bitching about the php extensions to MySQL.  As expected, YumEx was non-functional.  So, as root user:

# yum update yumex

Then, used YumEx to focus on the package, php-MySQL.  It upgraded it, AND all of its dependencies, without a hitch.

After all that, a simple reboot, and reload YumEx in order to update all packages, as well as the kernel, and kernel-headers.  😉

  VNC screen capture

Well, the upgrade this morning to Fedora 14 was a lot more painless than Redhat 7.2 -> 7.3 back in the day.  Sure went a lot faster, too.  Only about one hour, including the 15 minute DVD media ‘check’.

Upon boot, there were the initial problems that I pretty much expected:  The stream was dead since ices wouldn’t run, and (much more importantly) yumex was dead as well.  So, I took care of the issues in order of priority.  (And, MOST importantly, and surprising to me, the Ethernet interface was DOWN.)

(as root user)

$ ifup eth0

$ yum clean all

$ yum update yumex  (then, the same for python-kitchen and pexpect.)  That took care of yumex, so that I can easily update all the system packages that the upgrade didn’t address.

ices was bitching about libshout2, which got updated during the upgrade, so a recompile was in order for that.  First, I had to download ices-0.4.tar.gz.

$ tar -xzvpf ices-0.4.tar.gz

$ cd ices-0.4

$ /.configure –with-perl –with-python –with-lame

$ make

(become root user)

$ make install

Since the CRAB server has a ‘custom’ file location for ices, I let it install to the location it wants to (by default), in case another program wants it there, and simply copy it over the ices in the custom location (preserving permissions and ownerships).

Now, I just have to update all the installed packages, using YumEx.  Depending how long that takes, will determine whether I’ll upgrade to Fedora 15 this evening.  😉

Today, I imaged the server’s OS drive, since the last image (not backup, but ‘image’) that I saved was a year ago.  Before I was able to boot the system with the Clonezilla boot disk, I had to replace the DVD Rom drive, since it was dead.  After that was finished, I upgraded the kernel and kernel headers.  The length of time the clonezilla image process took reminded me that I need to cut the size of / and /home.  😀  So, I’m starting on that one now.

Once that is finished to my satisfaction, I shall upgrade the Fedora 13 to 14 initially, and if things go well, to 15 and/or 16.  (I would like to get to at least 17 where the directories /bin, /sbin are ‘merged’ into /usr/bin/ and /usr/sbin/ for compatibility.)

Until I return to work on 8 Sep 2014, I would expect that there might be extended periods of server ‘downtime’ as I have decided that the best way to upgrade this legacy Fedora install would be from DVD media.

I will try to reduce inconvenience, but it may be noticeable.  😉