Upgrade Redhat ES3 R1 to ES3 R6

[Anh-Thu Tran]

This is our first time to upgrade Redhat ES3 R1 to R6, and we have limited knowledge about Linux. Is there any documents about this? Is there anything we should be aware of? Thanks.

[Vipulinux]

Hi

It is advised that you do an up2date on your box if it is running. With thi syou will have the latest packages.

Still if you want to upgrade make sure you backup all the data on your disks before upgrading to be on a safer side.

You can simply put the update cd and upgrade it will automatically detect the older version simply say yes to upgrade.

Cheers

[Steven E. Protter · Accepted solution]

Shalom,

You can lose your data.

You can boot and upgrade if the upgrader detects this is possible. Custom software may be damaged. binary non-rpm software will not be updated.

You can upgrade the kernel alone and see if that helps.

RH 4 has an excellent upgrader that reliably updates RH 3 systems. The problem is many users made the /usr filesystem too small on RH3 and the upgrade fails for that reason.

It is possible to boot of knoppix, expand /usr and do a RH4 upgrade with the warnings above from me and the prior post.

SEP

[George Liu_4]

There are no issues to upgrade ES3 to upto Update 6. There ARE big issues to upgraded to Update 8.
If you have plenty of storage space, I strongly suggest you to check "Enable RPM rollbacks" from "update --config --> Retrieval/Installation submenu". That allows you to roll back the old version of software in case something is not right with your applications.

There is no benefit to upgrade to RHEL4 and lots of things changed there. Don't upgrade to RHEL4 unless you have to, e.g. unsupported devices, necessary software, etc.

[Alan_152]

Do a backup 1st.

The supported way is to use the utility "up2date". Another, but unsupported, method, is to upgrade from the CD/DVD media.

[Anh-Thu Tran]

Shoud I backup /opt /usr /var ... or just user data? The machine need to be down during the update? Thanks.

[Alan_152]

I'd do a full, cold backup so that the machine can be restored to its original configuration if things should go bad.

If you use up2date, the update can be done "live" but a reboot will be required to start the new kernel. If you use the unsupported optical media method, then the machine will be down and in single-user mode for roughly 1 hour.

[George Liu_4]

just backing up user data is enough

[Anh-Thu Tran]

So I suppose to get the ES3 R6 from linux web site and move to our machine? After running up2date command? Any options when running it? Thanks.

[Alan_152]

read the man page for up2date.

[Anh-Thu Tran]

So with up2date I can go straight from Update 1 to Update6? Or I should go to each upgrade one at a time, for example, go from 1 to 2, and 2 to 3, ....?

[Alan_152]

that kind of depends on how many changes there are and if there are any interdependency steps. I can think of some things that need to go through an intermediate package before completely becoming current.

What I would do is run an up2date sequence followed by a reboot until up2date makes no further changes to the system.

[George Liu_4]

Seems most issues of Update 8 has been fixed. You may run

up2date -u

to update all packages of your OS to update 8.
You don't need to do incremental update.

Good Luck