Well, a couple months ago, the server’s Fedora 28 250GB system drive suffered a crash. Unfortunately, in the process, I lost the last few blog posts due to the automatic blog backup cron had quit working. So, I worked on fixing that little issue and moved forward, accepting that minimal loss as acceptable.

After I replaced the system hard drive, and restored the image, I decided, that since Fedora 28 had recently gone EOL, it would be a good time to upgrade to Fedora 30, since Fedora 31 had recently been released. Now, would be a good time to remind everybody that Fedora had recently ditched yum for everything, including installing individual packages, in favor of dnf.

Starting with Fedora 22, the yum fedup had been replaced with dnf system upgrade, which is a much cleaner method to upgrade a Fedora system. The first things to do, are to fully update the system, and insure that you have the dnf system upgrade plugin. I’lll go over the commands required below:

$ sudo dnf update
$ sudo dnf -y install dnf-plugin-system-upgrade
$ sudo dnf system-upgrade download –releasever=30 –allowerasing
$ sudo dnf system-upgrade reboot

By the way, if you have upgraded from an old Fedora version, you probably need to enable your user to use sudo, by editing the /etc/sudoers file. If you have installed from a fairly recent release, by default, your user has root sudo access, and the root account is disabled. Unless you really know what you are doing, don’t enable the root account, and instead use sudo. 😉

The process above tends to take quite some time, but after it was finished, and I checked the server to make sure everything was working properly, I decided to upgrade the server to the current release, Fedora 31. I used the same commands, replacing 30 with 31, and didn’t need to install the dnf plugin, since I had previously done that.

That was when I discovered that the day that I knew would eventually get here, had arrived. Back in Fedora 25, you could no longer download a 32 bit version, however, you could still upgrade an existing 32 bit version. Now, as of Fedora 31, you could no longer upgrade an existing 32 bit version. Since the current server was put into service back in 2010 (It was a HP D530 Convertible Mini Tower). It was only a Pentium 4 32 bit cpu running at 2.80 GHz, with 4GB of ram….

So, I had to order some hardware. I decided on a pair of HP Elite 8300 Convertible Mini Tower boxes. (i5 running at 3.2Ghz with 8GB ram, expandable to 32GB) I managed to get a pair of these at about $165 each. Both had 500GB drives with Win10 Pro on them, and DVD burners. I really didn’t want such a large system drive, so replaced it with a 320GB Sata drive, and started preparing the 4TB Storage and 4TB backup drives. I also install 2 Sata hot swap bays into the two unused 5.25″ bays, to make upgrading the storage drives easier in the future. (I’ll go over how to prep a Linux drive in a later post…)

I then installed fresh, Fedora 31, and started migrating all the user accounts. (If I neglected anybody, please let me know) I also migrated all web content, including the blogs. There have been other things that Fedora has ditched along the way like MySQL in favor of MariaDB and rc.local support, which is nice to have for people that have been in the Linux game as long as I have. I think I started with RedHat 4.0 Linux back in late 1996, and Unix way before that. 😉 (I’ll cover how to install and set up MariaDB, enable rc.local file support, and the proper way to use systemctl in a post soon.)

Another thing. You will probably notice some speed up of things, and attribute it to the new, faster 64 bit server. Well, partially. In moving things around, I discovered that pulling the server out of the router’s DMZ, and forwarding specific ports and port ranges helped things out dramatically. So, for the moment the server is almost fully set up, but all the core services should be running fine, to include ftp, http, music stream, etc. If anybody has any issues, please don’t hesitate to reach out to me. 😉

Also, keep your eyes peeled for a large music update to celebrate this. 😀