5 thoughts on - Crazy Thought About Upgrading To New Major Release

• the correct method is

  1) backup all user files, databases, and settings.

  2) clean install c7, configure required packages.

  3) restore user files, databases, and settings.

  or easier

  1) install c7 on new server

  2) move over all services, functionality, etc. one by one.

• This is how I do it. I just don’t trust updates. Plus there is all sorts of detritus that builds up that you really don’t want to drag along….

• Jerry Geis wrote:
  I know I’ve posted what we do here to upgrade one system from another before, but not in a few years.

  mkdir /new mkdir /boot/new rsync -HPavzx –exclude=/old –exclude=/var/log/wtmp
  –exclude=/var/log/lastlog $machine:/. /new/. rsync -HPavzx $machine:/boot/. /boot/new/. rsync -HPavzx /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth*
  /new/etc/sysconfig/network-scripts rsync -HPavzx /etc/sysconfig/hwconf /new/etc/sysconfig rsync -HPavzx /boot/grub/device.map /boot/new/grub/
  rsync -HPavzx /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules
  /new/etc/udev/rules.d/
  find /new/var/log/ -type f -exec cp /dev/null {} \;

  Fix /new/etc/fstab, ESP if you use UUID. I *strongly* prefer LABELThen, any webserver stuff if the old was running it. If this system is using Linux RAID,

  rsync -HPavx /old/etc/md.conf /etc/

  If yuo want to, copy the original SSH keys:

  rsync -HPavzx /etc/ssh/ssh_host* /new/etc/ssh

  Don’t forget /boot/grub/device.map, and for C6, /new/boot/grub/grub.conf is right, or for C7, /new/boot/grub2/grub.conf is good.

  NOTE this will work for identical machines. Otherwise, BEFORE you rotate ou may need to run “mkinitrd” for the latest kernel if the hardware is different between the machine you are upgrading and the machine you made the copy.

  mount –bind /dev /new/dev mount –bind /sys /new/sys mount –bind /proc /new/proc mount –bind /boot/new /new/boot chroot /new cd /lib/modules VER=$(ls -rt1 | tail -1)
  echo $VER
  mkinitrd X $VER
  mv X /boot/initrd-$VER.img exit umount /new/dev /new/sys /new/proc /new/boot

  Then rotate:

  zsh zmodload zsh/files

  cd /boot mkdir old mv * old mv old/lost+found . mv old/new/* .

  # Root partition. cd /
  mkdir old mv * old mv old/lost+found .
  #mv old/root . — WHY?
  mv old/scratch . mv old/new/* .

  sync sync

  And reboot. If there are issues with grub, get it up from the grub shell, then grub-install or grub2-install as appropriate.

  mark

• Interesting process. As far as I can tell, this keeps very little of the configuration from the old system. You would still have to re-install and copy the configurations for any necessary packages along with any crontab entries that were on the old system.

  Other than reducing downtime, what are the advantages of doing this rather than just building the new OS onto a new hard drive and then copying things over?

• Bowie Bailey wrote:

  About the configurations, yep. Apache, heartbeat, any of that. Advantages?
  Let’s see… the bleeding edge (as of last summer) boxes we have won’t work with our setup of PXEboot builds, and if you’re updating a cluster
  (say, 23 or 24 boxes), it goes very quickly, and they’re identical. Actually, any time you want the machine to be updated to be identical to the one you’re copying from, it’s nice. And quick.

  mark