Truls Gulbrandsen wrote:
Hi,
I am preparing to upgrade from fc2 to fc3 and have made a backup of my
/home directory.
That is a good start.
Are there other directories or files that should be copied before I
upgrade?
It depends. If you are running your mail or databases on this PC, then
you should consider the files stored in /var. For example
/var/spool/mail has each users incoming mail file. The home directory
may have mail folders. This all depends on clients and servers in play
for your mail configuration. In the Red Hat world, perhaps, Linux
Standards Base, LSB, too, /var contains database, web, and other
"growing" related directories/filesystems. You can skip /var/log, however.
Will the upgrade option give me a complete installation or will it only
upgrade files and modules already installed?
Anaconda stores two files in the /root/ directory. They are upgrade.log
and install.log. Both come into play in an upgrade. They will have
messages like "The following packages were available in this version but
NOT upgraded:" Based on that message, I'd say that it would upgrade
just the packages that you have on the current system. RPM dependencies
will force other packages to be installed that may not have been on the
prior version.
If I do a complete new installation will it be sufficient to install
additional programs such as gramps, thunderbird and firefox and then
I use NFS mounted homes so I am not sure this is the correct answer. In
other words, my home directories are not mounted while anaconda is
running. However, I have noticed that the applications take care of
changes to your .files or .directories located in your home directory,
when a new or upgraded application runs for the first time after
installation. That application takes care of it.
> copy the content of /home back to the hd to make it all work with data,
> bookmarks and stored mail?
Be careful here. Your bookmarks are stored in a ., dot directory. I
have an associate at work who rails against Red Hat because the
installer does not save his configuration information. Well this really
is a Problem Exists Between Chair AND Keyboard, PEBCAK. If you copy all
your files off and format everything, then you must pick up the dot
files too or you will lose your personal configuration. Use tar or pax.
If you did just a cp -r -p /home new_location, then all your dot files
would be lost. You have to add cp -r -p /home/*/.[a-zA-Z0-9]*
new_location in another pass to copy the dot files too. You must
backup the dot files and then correctly restore them to save your
bookmarks and gnome desktop configuration, etc. In the case of Mozilla,
the bookmarks and mail folders are stored in .mozilla directory in each
user's home directory. Take a look at these with ls -laF to see all the
dot files. You will not see them with just an ls -l.
I just came across the pax command. The -rw mode is a copy function.
The preserve, -p eop, options may be redundant but it works ok. I used
it to copy several user's home directories with all their dot files to a
new server via nfs recently. I left myself with a captain's log that
you could adapt for this process. You must copy from the source directory!
# Copy all the files from /home to /home
# 1. Mount the source directory into /mnt/cdrom
# I was too lazy to make a new mount point.
# mount -t nfs baloo:/home /mnt/cdrom
# 2. cd into source directory
# cd /mnt/cdrom
# 2. The target directory should have been created above
# 3. pax -rw -p eop . /targetdir
# pax -rw -p eop . /home
# 4. Unmount the source directory
# umount /mnt/cdrom
Pax can also operate on tar and cpio files. You can also copy files by
user, etc.--it's very powerful. For what it is worth, I found it on MS
Windows 2000 at work. I am sure Billy Boy thought we would tar and cpio
all our files up and untar them on MS Windows with one combination
command. However, pax might make MS Windows useful as a work around
until a Linux box is available. ;-)
Any thing else I should be aware of in order to restore my pc with fc3
without too much trouble?
You may not have time to do this right now if you are biting the bit to
get FC3 installed. I have kickstart files that rebuild all the
configuration information. Hence, I don't worry about the /etc
directory. I have my /home directory in a separate partition on my NFS
server. When I upgrade it, while using disk druid, I recreate the mount
point for /home, but I do not check the box to format /home. You may
want to move your home directory to a separate partition, if you have
time during this install. It will save you some time during future
installs. You'd back up home, but you wouldn't have to copy the files
back for each install unless you had an unplanned failure. :-(
Have fun,
Greg