Upgrading from RHAS 3.0 to RHAS 4.0 on a RX4640 server

[Jorge Cocomess]

I still have subscription with RH at the present time. What's the best approach to upgrade from RHAS 3.0 to 4.0? Any gotchas on the upgrade that I should watch out for? I am planning on doing the upgrade right after I have a known good backup of the server first. By the way, I already downloaded 4 ISO images from RH at this time. I have always done update patches from RPM files but never from an ISO image. How do go about doing this method?

Please help.

Thanks,
J

[Sung Oh · Accepted solution]

Hello,

If you have access to CD writer, you can burn those 4 ISO images to CDs and boot from CD-ROM to start your update. it will ask you if you want to upgrade your system or fresh install. If you decide to start fresh install, you will loss all your configuration. if you decide to start upgrade, the installation process will keep your current settings.

Regards,

Sung

[Jorge Cocomess]

Sung - What if you have one bad CD out of 4 of them, what do you do? Do you think I should setup like a samba or NFS mount point from another Linux server and run the install from there?

What other options do I have? What about run 2update directly from the server?

Any other thoughts?

Thanks,
J

[Alan_152]

You could run up2date. But I would go ahead and burn the isos onto CD and do the update from there.

I understand your concern about perhaps there being a bad burn on one of the cds... the installer will give you the option of testing each of the cds before starting the install. Or, you could install to another box as a test first (you probably ought to do that anyway, as the 4 installer is a bit different than the 3 installer)

[Sung Oh]

Hi Jorge,

As Alan's comments the kickstart installation will ask you an option to test all CDs prior to installation. this should get rid of your concern about the bad ISO. I usually run MD5SUM after ISO image download from FTP site or HTTP site to verify that I have good ISO image. And Many FTP or HTTP site offers MD5SUM file along with there image.

you another option is to setup a network PXE server. This will take alot more time then updating from CDs. If you already have a PXE boot server on the network it will be great option. The standard Redhat CDs will have network boot image and you can setup boot image to PXE boot server and entire CD contents to a directory to NFS mount or HTTP from client server. This method is designed for massive network installation process. You also need to setup elilo.efi on the PXE server for initial boot from client. A client then will boot elilo.efi via network from PXE server and start to download kernel and ramdisk for initial boot. after this, Client will give you the same menu as you will see from CD installation process.

if you are interested in this , you can use below link regarding setting up PXE server on the network for redhat installation.

http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bc/docs/support/SupportManual/c00257674/c00257674.pdf

Best Regards,

Sung

[Steven E. Protter]

Shalom J,

The upgrade does occaisionally hammer customized configuration files. If you have made customizations, they will be in .rpmnew format.

Example:

/etc/init.d/sendmail

will become

/etc/init.d/sendmail.rpmnew

So services may not come up on first boot, but you can take your customizations and insert them right after the upgrade.

I'd take a full backup of the system prior to doing the upgrade. Its not fool proof.

SEP

[Jorge Cocomess]

Gentlemen - As always, excellent recommendations.

Many Thanks!!

J