Hi all. I need some advice on upgrading a SuSE7.3 box. The system delivers mail and files to a few users, and I wonder which is the fastest/easiest/safest way to do this. I have /home and a root partitions, and I'd like to leave /home alone and format root in order to install SuSE9. The system is messed up right now (mixed glibc versions and such), so I'd rather do a clean install than asking the installer to upgrade. This is what I planned to do: 1. Backup everything ;) 2. Format the root partition and install SuSE9 keeping the old /home. 3. Add to the new /etc/passwd and /etc/shadow the lines from the old ones corresponding to the users. Q: will this be enough to give access to the users with the same passwords? 4. Have a nice friday afternoon configuring Samba, Apache, Amanda, etc, etc I'd really appreciate any suggestions. Thanks in advance, David -- David Jacovkis Halperin Grup de Física dels Materials I Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona 08193 Bellaterra Spain http://vega.uab.es Tel: (34) 93 581 1481 Fax: (34) 93 581 2155 Jabber: memnoch@jabber.at / ICQ: 103428664 / MSN: memnoch@inicia.es No uso ningún programa de Micro$oft. Por favor, no me mandes archivos de M$Office.
David Jacovkis Halperin wrote:
Hi all. I need some advice on upgrading a SuSE7.3 box. The system delivers mail and files to a few users, and I wonder which is the fastest/easiest/safest way to do this.
I have /home and a root partitions, and I'd like to leave /home alone and format root in order to install SuSE9. The system is messed up right now (mixed glibc versions and such), so I'd rather do a clean install than asking the installer to upgrade.
This is what I planned to do:
1. Backup everything ;)
Looks reasonable.
2. Format the root partition and install SuSE9 keeping the old /home.
Carefully ensuring not to reformat /home. The last upgrade I did 8.2 --> 9.0, with just a / partition and swap without reformatting, it left /home unchanged.
3. Add to the new /etc/passwd and /etc/shadow the lines from the old ones corresponding to the users. Q: will this be enough to give access to the users with the same passwords?
It should, but you can restore them both to get back to what you started with.
4. Have a nice friday afternoon configuring Samba, Apache, Amanda, etc, etc
Your samba configs should be easy to restore, apache I think has changed to /srv/www.
I'd really appreciate any suggestions.
Thanks in advance,
David
Have fun! Regards Sid. -- Sid Boyce .... Hamradio G3VBV and keen Flyer Linux Only Shop.
Thanks for your reply. BTW, I didn't even know there was a /srv dir in SuSE9 !
I think I'll really have some serious fun doing this ;)
David
Sembla que Sid Boyce
David Jacovkis Halperin
I need some advice on upgrading a SuSE7.3 box. The system delivers mail and files to a few users, and I wonder which is the fastest/easiest/safest way to do this. I have /home and a root partitions, and I'd like to leave /home alone and format root in order to install SuSE9.
I keep both the old and new versions of the OS on the computer. When the configuration of the newly installed OS is ready (it may take several days) then I only change the bootloader configuration to boot the new OS by default. I use this system both on production systems at work and at home. It makes upgrades less stressful, moreover, all configuration files in /etc are easily accessible. Approximately 10 GB for the old system partition is not a big problem nowadays when disk sizes are about 160 GB. -- A.M.
Alexandr Malusek wrote:
David Jacovkis Halperin
writes: I need some advice on upgrading a SuSE7.3 box. The system delivers mail and files to a few users, and I wonder which is the fastest/easiest/safest way to do this. I have /home and a root partitions, and I'd like to leave /home alone and format root in order to install SuSE9.
I keep both the old and new versions of the OS on the computer. When the configuration of the newly installed OS is ready (it may take several days) then I only change the bootloader configuration to boot the new OS by default.
I use this system both on production systems at work and at home. It makes upgrades less stressful, moreover, all configuration files in /etc are easily accessible. Approximately 10 GB for the old system partition is not a big problem nowadays when disk sizes are about 160 GB.
-- A.M.
You then have a belt and braces approach. Here where my laptop is crucial to work, I occasionally rsync it across to two other boxes as I have an array of broken drives enough to be very cautious, one box with 160G and the other with 80G IDE and 18G SCSI. Regards Sid. -- Sid Boyce .... Hamradio G3VBV and keen Flyer Linux Only Shop.
Well, the new system is up and running! A couple of things are still being worked out, but the main services were running a couple of hours after I began installing 9.0Pro last friday. I liked the YAST installer, the GUI is nice and at the same time complete, for example the partitioning module, it has both a quite smart wizard and a good "expert" section. I left /home untouched and did a clean install of the system. On the server side I liked the change from sendmail to postfix, and the YAST administration modules have improved a great deal. I miss some details though, as a more complete firewall admin in YAST. It was much better to edit the config file. In short, the upgrade/reinstall was less traumatic than I expected, and I enjoyed the new SuSE look. Thanks all for your advice, David -- David Jacovkis Halperin Grup de Física dels Materials I Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona 08193 Bellaterra Spain http://vega.uab.es Tel: (34) 93 581 1481 Fax: (34) 93 581 2155 Jabber: memnoch@jabber.at / ICQ: 103428664 / MSN: memnoch@inicia.es No uso ningún programa de Micro$oft. Por favor, no me mandes archivos de M$Office.
participants (3)
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Alexandr Malusek
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David Jacovkis Halperin
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Sid Boyce