Well, I did it … and, so far (knock wood), it’s working ok.

What I did was: Upgrade my Redhat Linux 8.0 system to Fedora Core 4.

Last time I tried this it went horribly wrong … there was some kind of problem with the system that caused all available memory to be eaten up like it was going out of style … and then it started chewing on the swap space … to the extent that there was no memory and no swap space available.

To add insult to the injury … my backup procedure wasn’t as solid as I had hoped.

The end result was that my system was down for about 2 days while I recovered manually.

This time, however, I had a absolutely fool proof backup plan.

Since my hard drives are mirrored (Using a hardware based mirroring device by an Arco DupliDisk), I was able to pull the primary drive out of the mirrored pair and upgrade that. If the upgrade failed for any reason (or fails … I’m not ruling out the possiblity), all I have to do is put the primary drive back into the mirrored set and run the software to duplicate the secondary drive to the primary, and I’m back to where I started.

So far, however, it seems to be going ok.

There were a few glitches because of software installed on /usr/local … and the MySQL database is screwed up for some reason. But I can work around those.

Once I’m confident the system is working the way it should … I’ll put the primary drive back into the mirrored pair and run the software to duplicate the primary to the secondary.

FWIW: If the iSeries had even half the problems upgrading that Linux does … it would have never gotten off the ground.

Update Tuesday evening: Looks like the upgrade was successful. The only significant glitch was a problem with MySQL. I had problems with the permissions tables that I couldn’t get resolved until today. Not entirely sure what the problem was … but I had to change my /etc/hosts table, restart mysql without permissions checking, and reset the database root password.

[tags]Linux, Fedora, upgrade, raid[/tags]