On Monday 28 July 2003 22:26, Alan Dawson wrote:

Quoting BandiPat :

...

Your best bet is to do a fresh install, getting the best setup and install. Also gives you a chance to cleanup things in the process.

So a fresh install sounds the way to go. I sort of thought was going to be the answer.

The machine has a few MySQL databases on it. Are there any opinions on the best way to keep them intact after a fresh install?

AED

Yeah, Move em somewhere safe. Another computer, burn a CD whatever. You could almost justify cableing in an old unused drive for this if you have one. -- _____________________________________ John Andersen

On Monday 28 July 2003 22:25 pm, David wrote:

On Tue, 29 Jul 2003, Alan Dawson wrote:

...

I have a happy server running SuSE 7.2

As that is soon to be unsupported by SuSE, I've purchased a copy of SuSE 8.2, and was hoping to upgrade. The machine runs stock SuSE 7.2 services, except for a custom compiled php 4.2.3 and mailman 2.0.11

Is anybody got any insight into what's going to break when I put the SUSE 8.2 CD in and say yes to an upgrade?

The upgrade chapter in the book covers most of the issues.

You didn't say which stock services you run so people can be more specific.

Several people running servers have recommended doing an install on another machine and hot swapping to avoid an unexpectedly long outage.

David

Unless you can back up the entire machine and be prepared to restore it, you'd be a dumb *&^% to try it. What do you do if it goes haywire? I've only done one upgrade in the my life... it didn't work and I ended up doing a NEW INSTALL of the old release. Took me several days to get back to where I started. And that was from 8.0 to 8.1. I'll never do an upgrade again. -- +----------------------------------------------------------------------------+ + Bruce S. Marshall bmarsh@bmarsh.com Bellaire, MI 07/29/03 09:10 + +----------------------------------------------------------------------------+ "You might be a high-tech Red-neck if: you have more friends on the Internet than in real life"

On Tue, 29 Jul 2003, arnaud kubacki wrote:

...

...

...

I have a happy server running SuSE 7.2

As that is soon to be unsupported by SuSE, I've purchased a copy of SuSE 8.2, and was hoping to upgrade. The machine runs stock SuSE 7.2 services, except for a custom compiled php 4.2.3 and mailman 2.0.11

Is anybody got any insight into what's going to break when I put the SUSE 8.2 CD in and say yes to an upgrade?

The upgrade chapter in the book covers most of the issues.

You didn't say which stock services you run so people can be more specific.

Several people running servers have recommended doing an install on another machine and hot swapping to avoid an unexpectedly long outage.

...

Unless you can back up the entire machine and be prepared to restore it, you'd be a dumb *&^% to try it. What do you do if it goes haywire?

I've only done one upgrade in the my life... it didn't work and I ended up doing a NEW INSTALL of the old release. Took me several days to get back to where I started. And that was from 8.0 to 8.1. I'll never do an upgrade again.

I have already done an upgrade from SuSE 6.3 to SuSE 7.2 and that worked pretty well. I am going to upgrade the same computer from SuSE 7.2 to SuSE 8.0 and I will see what problems will occur.

This is really a shame that we cannot (in general) upgrade our system. SuSE and the others should work on that matter to provide us an easy upgrade without hassle. If SuSE was able to do it 2 years ago why not today ?

I just updated from 7.3 to 8.2 - I think it went more smoothly than a fresh install would have done. ** But the box is a workstation with only a few simple services ** Each rpm is designed to cleanly replace its predecessors, and save a copy of the old or the new config files. Many app authors make big upgrades to config file format which mean that you have to manually migrate configs. Other times the rpm builder feels confident in migrating your old configs to the new app and just writing an .rpmnew file. Therefore you need to *understand* your configs to get things working the way they used to be. This is true also with a fresh install - but at least everything is working when you are done your install (maybe not enabled, and maybe not the way you want it, but working.) Personally I think SuSE do as much as most OS vendors. But I don't know all the vendors by any means. Reading between the lines of SLE (and grossly generalizing) - most users that like updates updated workstations, those that prefer fresh installs have servers. **important note** - when updating look carefully through /etc and /var for .rpmnew .saved .YaST2.save .Yast2save .orig .yast and .rpmsave files I prefer updates to fresh installs, but I also agree with the OP (Bruce?): "Unless you can back up the entire machine and be prepared to restore it, you'd be a dumb *&^% to try it. " If you don't like what an update does to your personal home directory (after a couple of updates your desktop has none of the cool new SuSE/KDE features that other list members are raving about) just grab the appropriate templates from /etc/skel and you can have technicolor geeko everywhere - and maybe even fewer unexplained KDE/susehelp/whatever glitches. David