On Thu, 7 Sep 2017 22:03:15 +1000
Eyal Lebedinsky <fedora(a)eyal.emu.id.au> wrote:
[resend, never saw the first one]
I have a server running f19 (don't ask). It is heavily customised so
I prefer to not do a fresh install of f26 and reconfigure everything.
I am reading the upgrade guide at
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Upgrading?rd=Upgrade
which says (Upgrading from End of life releases).
"If you have Fedora 20 or earlier, you will have to perform
at least part of the upgrade with bare yum. You can either use that
method to upgrade to Fedora 21 or later" My plan is to do this
f19 -> f21 (yum)
following
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Upgrading_Fedora_using_package_manager
f21 -> f26 (DNF system upgrade)
I suspect that attempting to go directly to f26 may be a bridge too
far.
I will check and clean the system before/after each step.
Beyond the listed "common problems", is there any reason to not
follow this path? Is there a better way?
I think this will be a nightmare. You are going through five versions
without active repositories, and with all the orphaned packages (which
might include libraries you need), the name changes, the structural
changes, etc.
Is there any way that you can install the new server in parallel with
the existing server? That is, carve out some room on the hard drive
and do a fresh install of f26. Or purchase a new drive, install it on
the server system, and do a fresh install there. Then you have a
working backup to fall back to if f26 is too much to deal with at any
time. And, you have the customized version still there to map into the
new version, as you discover discrepancies over time and at your
leisure. Good opportunity to document all that customisation, too. :-)
Failing that, could you clone the existing f19 server installation to
another system and do a test upgrade run on the clone before risking
your production server? If the test upgrade works, you could then just
rsync back to your production server, and be in business again. Well,
there would be some tidying up to do in the boot process (fstab,
grub.conf, etc.), but everything else should just work. And if it
fails, you've dodged a bullet.
There would have to be a *lot* of difficult and obscure customisation
before I would consider going the path you are thinking of. And it is
very risky if the server is at all critical.