[SOLVED]Purgatory: RH9 -> FC1

[Michael Hipp]

Michael Hipp wrote:

> To make a long story long ...
> 
> My local server is bad in need of upgrading and I decided to do it by 
> the cli/network method rather than using the disks since I have several 
> more to do after this and most are some considerable distance from here.
> 
> I tried upgrading RH9 -> FC3 but that appears nigh impossible. So I 
> dropped back to a stepwise approach and am at the RH9 - > FC1 step. 
> Unfortunately the box I'm upgrading was installed as RH9 with "everything".
> 
> I'm using the instructions at:
>   http://www.brandonhutchinson.com/Upgrading_Red_Hat_Linux_with_yum.html
> which seems pretty straightforward.

Well, the upgrade via yum and done entirely logged in via SSH seems to 
have worked. The box is now FC1.

A recap:
1. Followed the instructions linked above to install yum and fedora-release.
2. Tried yum upgrade but it failed with dependencies on 
redhat-config-securitylevel, cadaver, pine, jdkgcj.
3. I uninstalled those. This forced the uninstall of firstboot also.
4. Then set yum -y upgrade running. The dependency tests, test 
transaction, downloading and install took about 6 hours total in about 
equal chunks each. It downloaded and installed or upgraded 2505 packages 
totaling about 1.8GB.
5. I then did find /etc -iname '*rpmsave' to look for any config file 
issues to be merged. Found none needing attention - surprise.
6. Did /sbin/chkconfig to see if startup services had been changed. It 
needed only minor attention.
7. Did /sbin/poweroff -r now and ran to server room to watch the 
console. It seemed to shutdown cleanly and reboot cleanly except for...
8. Noticed that ntpd failed to get a time sync on reboot.
9. Came back in here and logged in via ssh.
10. Checked /var/log/messages about ntpd, said "network unreachable".
11. Investigation found it had no gateway (default route). ***BAD this 
means the box was unreachable from the outside - this is a showstopper 
for remote upgrades.
12. I added the gateway with 'route add default gw 192.168.0.1'
13. All seems well.

Tomorrow I'll probably start upgrading it to FC3 (I'll attempt to skip 
FC2). I'll also start upgrading the RH9 server at our church remotely. 
It's only a few blocks away so I can punt if it gets in trouble. This 
time I'll be looking for the gateway problem before the reboot.

Michael