Finally decided to upgrade my development server from FC6 to FC9. Ran mkCDrec and created 36 CDROM iso images (the server doen’t have a DVD drive to recover from, so CD images) onto a seperate external drive on my file server. Obviously I haven’t actually burnt them to CD yet,won’t unless I do have to rebuild it if at all, I mean 36 of them !. But I had to at least do the backup as it is also my kickstart server and I can’t afford to trash it.
Anyway, I have been network booting (pxeboot) in my FC9 installs. So I was getting ready to try an upgrade when… wait a minute, my development server is also my kickstart server; I can’t network boot it or boot off CD to do a kickstart as the server won’t be running the OS to serve the files.
So, back to the manual method then, grabbed the DVD for the FC9 install I used for my desktop, oops wait a minute it doesn’t have a DVD drive.
Rather than be sensible and just take the easy way out and download the install CDs I’m thinking
- download the Fedora-9-i386-netinst.iso and see if that can do an upgrade off the internet (well I suppose I could read the documentation, but that would be sensible and not as much fun)
- if that doesn’t work then I could recover the system on the .iso backups onto a VM image and try to upgrade off that, hmm have to change the ip addr and make it the dns server during the upgrade. And I would have to find out how to put the VM on the main network for tftpboot to find it, ahh no I won’t I can kickstart by ipaddr from the ‘askmethod’ option once its networked, I have to do that from one server that doesn’t pxe boot anyway so it should work this way. So that will be the second thing to try. Going to have to find 120Gb of disk space somewhere though for the VM disk image, I suppose I need a backup external drive :-).
- and as the very last resort take the sensible option and download the CDs, but based on the time its taking to pull down the netinst.iso getting the 6 CDs will take about 32hrs(plus) using my broadband provider, so definately the last resord here
Actually in the long term a VM is probably the better option, as this is going to happen again and at least a VM can be moved about easily. But I can’t help but think installing from a VM is going to be very slow. But theres that disk space issue again as well, I’m jumping FC6, FC8 and FC9 systems regularly; all changes are done on this development server and a complete network re-install of the system is done to migrate them through so thats a lot of disk space. Maybe I’ll revisit that way in the future as if I can kickstart from a ‘recovered’ system in a VM from the mkCDrec .iso files at least I know I have a workable method for the short term.
And I know mkCDrec will allow that as I have had to bare metal install the development server when the HD died, and it justed worked.
Anyway, initial delaying tactic is downloading Fedora-9-i386-netinst.iso, which has 35 minutes remaining, by which time a TV program I want to watch is on, so it won’t be tonight.
…..
lots of playing, gave up, will go straight to FC10
