Daevid Vincent wrote: > I thought the review was excellent and very informative. What I would be > very interested in knowing, is HOW an upgrade from RH8 to RH9 went. F.e. > when upgrading from RH7.3 to RH8, they introduced the new (and broken) > Apache 2.0/PHP/mySQL that didn't all work right. Were there any major > gotchas or problems? > [...] I'll speak somewhat on the RH 8.0 to RH 9 upgrade based on my experience last night. My new installation is running practically flawless so far. I have a number of freshrpms packages, some packages which I had grabbed from RawHide and recompiled for RH 8.0 for added features or errata fixes which weren't released mainstream, as well as some packages from 3rd parties which were just plain newer (Mozilla 1.3 Gtk2). The installed detected the presence of the "Third Party Packages", and said that they may no longer function with this release. I accepted the warning and proceeded, knowing that what I had installed wasn't critical enough to keep me out after installation. I noticed that during package selection, that some of the packages it was trying to install were older than ones I had already installed, so the installer intelligently deselected them for me. I, however, reselected them so that the "binary compatible" packages would overwrite my own. I then proceeded as usual. In the end with dependencies, it found apt and xmms-mp3, and said it didn't have a version for dependencies compatible, though it allowed me to proceed. (see below for what I did about that) On the older machine PII-450 reading off of 3 CD-RW's, the install took about 1.5 hours as I have most packages selected. Upon reboot, things came up just fine, except for X. While the GDM process was kind enough to inform me that X wasn't starting and offered to run redhat-config-xwindows or whichever the tool is, I kindly declined. I knew that all I needed to do was reinstall the NVidia driver using the new NVidia binary in order to get X to come up properly. Alternately, I could have let the X config tool reselect the NV driver if I was in a pinch. The next step - and this is one commonly missed by most newbie users - is to find all *.rpmsave and *.rpmnew files ( find / -name *.rpmsave; find / -name *.rpmnew ) . I diff compared these (using diff -y --left-column file1 file1.rpmnew to get a side-by-side view) to see the differences, and then either moved the rpmnew file to the config file, or copied the important new differences to my original config. This is an important step as changes may have been introduced to new packages which require these additional settings (for functionality or security reasons). Some minor changes you'll see in this process would include things such as vsftpd is standalone now and not called from xinetd, some additional SAMBA changes in the config regarding PAM and printing systems, etc. While looking at configs, make sure you verify that new services which you may not want weren't added. I found that privoxy and a few other daemons were now automatically starting - not something I wanted by default just yet. Speaking of printing printing, while CUPS is now the default, the upgrade did not automagically change this for me, but left my printer (Epson Stylus C80) configured under LPD. The transition using redhat-switch-printer would have been a simple one had I not had existing CUPS printers defined. Because I had tried CUPS once before, and had multiple instances of the same printer (but with different driver settings for resolution, etc.), CUPS was refusing to start correctly. Once I went in through the CUPS web interface and removed these additional printers, the CUPS service appeared to start correctly and Red Hat's print manager handled reading these without a problem. Recall that I mentioned that I overwrote some of my RH8.0 errata packages with the stock packages from RH 9. This means that my next step was to reapply RH 9 errata (from FTP - RHN is just plain swamped). My last step was to revisit freshrpms, and grab the latest packages for xmms-mp3 and apt which the installer advised didn't match dependency wise. All in all fairly smooth for a seasoned admin. I do wish, however, that they'd make the config file changes a bit more intelligent vs. simply creating an .rpmsave or .rpmnew file which most people might ignore at the expense of functionality or performance. The printer issue may have also been a show stopper for some more inexperienced users, but I think I may have been a special case. Things that are still working right include Apache/PHP (no mySQL installed, so no word there) although I still kept my old php.ini settings to make things "work like they used to", Sendmail with TLS, etc. I know this is just one (long-winded) perspective of an upgrade install, however I hope it sheds some light on some things to look for. I've yet to attempt running my Loki games, or peek into every "nook and cranny" for features. Rgds, -Rick -- Rick Johnson, RHCE #807302311706007 - rjohnson@xxxxxxxxxx Linux/Network Administrator - Medata, Inc. (from home) PGP Public Key: https://mail.medata.com/pgp/rjohnson.asc
