Quoting Donald Tripp <[email protected]>:
When you do any upgrade its always important to make a backup of
critical system files along with the user space. If you have any
special daemons running make sure to backup the config files for
those as well. From 4 to 4 there were some base level changes, so
you may have to do a bit of tweaking, but probably not much. When
you reboot make sure the grub config loads the newest kernel, so the
highest number. I'm assuming your probably running ext3, so you
should be fine.
When you think of "upgrading" a linux system, don't think of it in
terms of a windows desktop like upgrade, but more like a bunch of
updates put together. Yes, there were some significant changes in
RHEL/SL 5, but not really any earth-shatering stuff. If you ever
look at the iso files once they are mounted, all you will see is a
bunch of RPM files. The "upgrade" will install these RPM files, and
any necessary dependencies. Many of them will simply be newer
versions of files you already have. If there are new files, or some
older files that will no longer be used, your system will just take
more hard drive space then a clean install would. If an RPM creates
a new configuration file, the original should still be there as well.
Off the top of my head I can't think of any system specific
applications that had major configuration file changes between SL 4
and 5. The way your network interfaces are handled will change in
5.4, so if you made any changes to the ifcfg-eth files you will may
have to modify the corresponding network service files.
Good luck!
On Dec 8, 2009, at 10:05 PM, g wrote:
[email protected] wrote:
I am running Scientific Linux 4.3 and I want to upgrade to the latest
version 5.4. Now, I have downloaded the two .iso files. If I install these,
will I be able to keep my existing file system, or will the volume in my
hard drive be erased, and hence I will have to save my programs and files
somewhere else.
if you select *upgrade*, it _should_ be go well.
have a look at;
https://www.scientificlinux.org/documentation/howto/upgrade.5x
In addition, what else can go wrong when doing this? (I will not have a
problem with insufficient disk space.
nothing that i am aware of. in fact, other than time frame, for me,
it was as
simple and smooth as doing a yum update.
while i am at it, my thanks to scientific linux team for all their work in
making upgrade so easy and trouble free.
i would have said so sooner, but i have been busy rebuilding 2
fedora systems
and '/home' in this box and one other, when i ran an update, and tried to
upgrade them from f11 to f12.
system got trash in that it clobbered superblock on 3 hard drives along with
trashing hard drives to force me to rebuild system from blocks of
what i found
in fsck.ext3 in recover mode.
i did have backups that made '/home' recover easier, but there where several
bad backup dvd's that checked good when they were made.
to that end, be sure that you back your system and '/home' and
verify backups
before you do any upgrade. regardless of what distrib it is.
hth.
later.
--
peace out.
tc,hago.
g
.
****
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****
Thank you all for that helpful information. However, I have run into
another problem. I have mounted the first .iso file but I can not find
where the installation file--is it .sh or .exe?--is. Does anybody know
what file to look for in order to get this started, or point me to the
documentation where I can find this information?
Thank You for Responding:
Andrew Stallard
