[ale] Red Hat upgrades?

[Michael H. Warfield]

On Tue, 2011-07-05 at 09:17 -0400, James Sumners wrote: 
> On Fri, Jul 1, 2011 at 3:34 PM, James Sumners <james.sumners at gmail.com> wrote:
> > On Fri, Jul 1, 2011 at 3:29 PM, Geoffrey Myers
> > <lists at serioustechnology.com> wrote:
> >> I had RHEL 5.5 running and contacted RH to find out how to upgrade.  I
> >> was told you couldn't do an upgrade from 5 to 6, it had to be a new
> >> install.  Could be I was told wrong, but that is what I was told and
> >> didn't pursue the matter further.
> >
> > http://docs.redhat.com/docs/en-US/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux/6/html/Installation_Guide/sn-upgrading-system-x86.html
> 
> 
> I contacted them myself when the DVD kept refusing to find the
> installed OS. Here is the response:
> 
> "An upgrade from RHEL 4.9 to RHEL 5.6 is not happening due to the fact
> that there is a change in Major number between the 2 releases.
> 
> Inserting a DVD of RHEL 5.6 would provide you an option to Upgrade if
> your Operating system were to be : RHEL 5.5.
> This is possible because there is just a minor change in these versions.
> 
> RHEL 5.5 ==> RHEL 5.6 : Using RHEL 5.6 DVD : Up-gradable
> RHEL 4.9 ==> RHEL 5.6 : Using RHEL 5.6 DVD : Not Up-gradable

> Also,

> RHEL 4.9 ==> RHEL 5.0 : Using RHEL 5.0 DVD : Not Up-gradable.

> Every Major Release for example 4.x, 5.x, 6.x can be upgraded within
> its range of minor releases i.e: 0-9.
> However, to upgrade from a 4.x ==> 5.x, a fresh installation is needed
> due to a platform change."

That's been my understanding all along and is the "A number 1" reason
why I will stick to Fedora.  It's stable and you can do these kinds of
upgrades on the fly while the server is running.

I don't even use "preupgrade" under Fedora, although I continue to test
preupgrade but was recently burned by preupgrade when it left one of my
machines totally unbootable after preupgrade attempted to upgrade it
from F14 to F15 and could not deal with an irreconcilable dependency
issue.

For me, the "yum upgrade" has always worked the best.  They've improved
that to the point where it's almost trivial.  Now you just update the
system and check for config changes, import the pgp key, flush yum's
cache, then do a distsync to the new release version (yum clean all ;
yum --releasever=15 distsync) and a groupupdate on base.  I don't skip
major vers though.  To go from F12 to F15, you have to do F13 and F14 as
stops along the way.

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/YumUpgradeFaq

Regards,
Mike
-- 
Michael H. Warfield (AI4NB) | (770) 985-6132 |  mhw at WittsEnd.com
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