Jesse Keating wrote : > Upgrading from i386 to x86_64 is going to be a MUCH more difficult task. Mostly OT, but this is something I had wanted to try for a while and actually did last week on a server. Doing it with yum or even rpm seems unfortunately pretty much impossible, since x86_64 stuff won't install/run when still running an x86, so scriplets would fail miserably. Too bad, since forcing a minimal set of 64bit packages on the machine and rebooting it to continue the procedure could have been nice. The solution which worked for me was to rsync a clean x86_64 installation from an identical server as /root/foo, edit the few files that need to be (ifcfg-*, /etc/hosts, /etc/sysconfig/network). Then start moving the old root directories away and putting the new one into place. There are many directories that aren't much of a problem to move away (/etc, /home, /var, etc. even /boot) and others that don't need to be (/proc, /sys). But the trickiest one is /bin since you need "mv" to finish the job, and the 64bit /bin/mv won't work. What I did was "mv bin bin.32 && ./bin32/mv /root/foo/bin ." as the last step... and it worked. I don't know how to make the machine reboot without init being available, though, but luckily I have switched PDUs that I can control, so I remotely power cycled the server (run "sync" as early as possible, it can't harm!). I was really surprised when the server rebooted perfectly. I really thought grub would stop for some reason, or some other problem would prevent the server from booting... but no. A "new" x86_64 system up and running. That's how I went remotely from RHEL4 i386 to RHEL5 x86_64. YMMV of course, and I really don't recommend doing it... but it *is* possible ;-) Matthias -- Clean custom Red Hat Linux rpm packages : http://freshrpms.net/ Fedora Core release 6 (Zod) - Linux kernel 2.6.20-1.2952.fc6 Load : 3.44 3.10 2.88 -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
