Well I’ve finally moved my web server off FC8 and onto FC11.
You will probably find a few issues remaining, but I think I have cleaned 99% of them up.
I had a few major issues with the upgrade.
The first was slightly unrelated to this upgrade itself in that I didn’t want to break my FC8 kickstart environment, running from a FC10 server, by upgrading the FC10 server to FC11 until I had a backup rebuild environment. So I used my desktop machine that I had upgraded to FC11 to build a new PXE boot and kickstart environment, that actually took quite a bit of time as there are always quirks between releases; but I got there in the end. At that point I could use either my kickstart server or my desktop machine to PXE boot the web server back into life to either FC8 or when I’m happy with it FC11.
The second was that my FC8 kickstart scripts didn’t work with FC11. I didn’t think that was a biggie as I just did an interactive install to create the anaconda install log to base a new kickstart script on; WRONG… the FC11 anaconda install script doesn’t list the packages that were installed if using network boot anymore (it still does for a local install off DVD as my desktop showed, but thats no good for a my web server installl as I have different packages there)… and the anaconda install logs the disk layout incorrectly (puts pv creation after the lvcreation lines so when I did try and use what there was in the anaconda log it couldn’t use the disk anyway; easy enough to fix but a supprise). As the anaconda networked install log didn’t list the packages installed I had to re-use the FC8 one, and that was a pain due to product changes (ie: tightvnc replaced by tigervnc etc) so I spent most of the first kickstart install clicking on the ‘package missing continue’ button while removing the pacakage from the kickstart script on my new kickstart server config, until I had removed all the missing ones and tried to find replacements for the others to add back in; and retry, retry, retry. Obviously I got through that to a clean PXE boot install in the end.
The next issue was when I did have a bootable system I found apache is a bit stricter on rules in the version shipped with FC11 that it was with FC8 (or FC10), so I had to re-adjust the kickstart script with additional customisations. As those that have read earier posts know my development server is an FC10 server and my website changes are bundled up and migrated to ‘production’ using PXE network boot to completely re-install the (old FC8, now FC11) web server, managed with a lot of ‘sed’ translations in the kickstart script to change server id from the development one to the production one. As such the changed needed to resolve this were just a few more ‘sed’ lines to comment out things like the file cacheing module that seem to have disappeared. So I got through that.
And then MySQL didn’t like my old FC8/FC10 database backups. That was quite a big issue, but I got round that by using my FC10 dev server; I backed up and deleted my dev environment, untarred my FC8 backups from the kickstart directory into it, mysqldump’ed them out, reinstalled mysql on the prod server and manually loaded the dumps on the new prod server (99% took, got phpBB3 and wordpress seem happy with them anyway, and it got the website working again), did the mysql_upgrade on them to be safe and tar’ed the new databases up and pulled that copy back to the kickstart server for the next attempt; and of course retsored back my dev ones. So I got through that as well.
Those really were the only major issues I had.
What I have now is on my desktop machine an environment the ability to PXE boot into the FC8 or FC11 environments for the web server, however as I now know the mysql databases are incompatible between releases I have effectively lost the ability to capture changes made on the new server if I have to roll back. I can live with that.
The only other issue I had really was nothing to do with the web server upgrade, I just read somewhere that FC11 was going to get the boot time faster. On my two FC10 desktops I had a boot time of under 30 seconds, now they are both on FC11 the boot time is about 3 minutes… and the web server as well that boots in runlevel three takes that long as well.
And of course the time taken… the only way to test a kickstart is to kickstart. At least I know the disk is good, it’s been reformatted abot 50 times this week. Anyway thats the webserver upgrade post done.
So three out of four servers upgraded, the last is the biggee; my normal network install server and main development and backup server, plus the alert and automation focal point for all my servers. The development files are safe as all my CVS directories (both CVS library and exported work directories) are backed up daily onto external disk as well as being included in all my kickstart images so the web server now has a latest copy as well (backup overkill)), and the development website is the one kickstarted into the web server as well as being backed up seperately so thats OK. But being the backup server it has too much dasd to migrate to any other server in the meantime, have to re-install and pray it can pickup all the external dasd again so I can restore the application environment back down to the fresh install environment. Still… I have my mkCDrec backup (all 59 CDs of it, it doesn’t have a DVD drive :-)) if I need it.
But thats for next weekend. This weekend I have proven I can jumpstart the web server back in from my desktop which is all I really needed to achieve for now.
I’ll probably post a doco in the doco section on how
1. getting a desktop environment working, multimedia and all (fiddling I had to do with rpmfusion repositories was the only tricky bit)
2. using the desktop as the only source of rpm updates via yum. All my yum updates from internet repositories are only done to my desktop now, all my other servers get their yum updated from the desktop, a real bandwidth saving
3. Setting up a PXE/tftpboot/kickstart enviroment for FC11 maybe, thats pretty simple and I’m sure I covered it for FC10 somewhere anyway
So, later folks.
