Best way for newbie to upgrade from 7.5.4

[ssiAdmin]

While I've come a long way since I first started a couple of years ago, I still consider myself a newbie. I am no system administrator.

I have a copy of Virtuozzo 3.0 running on a RedHat EL4 box with 3 Plesk 7.5.4 VPS's running RedHat Nine. I need to get things updated and I'm not sure which I should focus on first.

- Do I upgrade RHEL4 on the box?

- Do I start with the Plesk installs?

- Would it be better for me to get another box that is new, get it up and running and then move some 300 sites to the new box and then reformat the current box?

I've heard and read some horror stories regarding upgrades. When you reply, let me know now only what to do first, but also what the best method for the upgrade should be. Should I use up2date, rpm, yum, something else? It is a production server and I really would feel more comfortable if I had a testing server (One of the VPS's is not being used so if I am upgrading Plesk, I can use that VPS as a testing server).

I really appreciate any guidance from those who have already gone through this.
Art

 

[pchammer]

I am wondering this as well. I have the exact same situation, and while the server's stable, I could benefit from upgrading to the newest Plesk version as could my clients.

Here is some general information about the machine...

# cat /proc/version
Linux version 2.6.9-1.667 ([email protected]) (gcc version 3.4.2 20041017 (Red Hat 3.4.2-6.fc3)) #1 Tue Nov 2 14:41:25 EST 2004

#top
top - 13:16:43 up 184 days, 17:15, 1 user, load average: 0.03, 0.09, 0.15
Tasks: 142 total, 1 running, 141 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie
Cpu(s): 2.1% us, 10.2% sy, 0.0% ni, 68.9% id, 18.6% wa, 0.1% hi, 0.0% si
Mem: 515320k total, 506428k used, 8892k free, 66420k buffers
Swap: 1048568k total, 119408k used, 929160k free, 64336k cached

# cat /proc/partitions
major minor #blocks name

3 0 117187500 hda
3 1 104391 hda1
3 2 117081720 hda2
253 0 115998720 dm-0
253 1 1048576 dm-1

# cat /proc/mounts
rootfs / rootfs rw 0 0
/proc /proc proc rw,nodiratime 0 0
none /dev tmpfs rw 0 0
/dev/root / ext3 rw 0 0
none /dev tmpfs rw 0 0
none /selinux selinuxfs rw 0 0
/proc /proc proc rw,nodiratime 0 0
/proc/bus/usb /proc/bus/usb usbfs rw 0 0
/sys /sys sysfs rw 0 0
none /dev/pts devpts rw 0 0
/dev/hda1 /boot ext3 rw 0 0
none /dev/shm tmpfs rw 0 0
none /proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc binfmt_misc rw 0 0
none /var/named/run-root/proc proc rw,nodiratime 0 0
sunrpc /var/lib/nfs/rpc_pipefs rpc_pipefs rw 0 0

# df -m
Filesystem 1M-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol00
111503 63825 42015 61% /
/dev/hda1 99 9 85 10% /boot
none 252 0 252 0% /dev/shm

Thanks in advance for your help. I appreciate it.

Regards,
William Ashworth

 

[dedidude]

I would also like to know the same, I signed up on this forum to get notified about any helpful replies to this thread.

I am not sure if I should to an up2date or yum or Plesk update first.

I am worried things will break its an e-commerce production server.

I don't know if I should just update to the latest version in the Plesk updater coming from Plesk 7.5.4 or if I should do it step by step going through all the versions?

Reasons for updating:
- I would like to have an updated version of mysql as well as the new features of Plesk.
- General security
- Server load is very high not sure what else to try to fix it other than updating everything (mysqld is causing high CPU load)

Right now the server runs:

# cat /etc/redhat-release
Red Hat Enterprise Linux ES release 3 (Taroon Update 9)

# cat /usr/local/psa/version
7.5.4 RedHat el3 75060617.18

# cat /proc/version
Linux version 2.4.21-53.ELsmp ([email protected]) (gcc version 3.2.3 20030502 (Red Hat Linux 3.2.3-58)) #1 SMP Wed Nov 14 03:54:12 EST 2007