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Centos 4.5 - Centos 5 upgrade

B

baravalle

Guest
Hi everyone,
I'm posting this messagge just to share the story of a upgrade gone wrong.

I had already updated successfully from different centos 4.x releases (remotely, not locally), and yesterday I tried to do the 4.5 -> 5. Bad idea.

I have followed very carefully the installation instructions in the centos web site - but everything went wrong.

The instructions look simple, and are very precise. But they refer to a "fresh" Centos configuration (they do say so - but I tought it might not be to complex to do it anyway). If you do have customisations and other stuff - well, I don't know what to suggest.

It's now 25 hours that I have been trying to sort out the situation, and much of it is because of stuff that I shouldn't have done.

I did manage to identify some of the problems (glibc conflics, at some point, grub misconfiguration, later, packages completly messed up by the disasters that I did trying to solve the problems, at the end).

I did manage to solve may of the problems (which required using a live distribution and enter in the old system wich a chroot jail), but didn't suceed at the end. Might well manage to solve it with longer ours, but I'm too tired right now, and I'm going to ask simply for a OS reinstallation.

I have been doing this work remotely. I'm sure that doing it locally might have been a easier - but my server is at 2000 km from my home, and it's just not an option.

Basically, if by any reason you might be tempted to update Centos remotely, think twice. And then think twice again.

I did think twice - and I still went ahead (I really wanted an updated python to install some security applications). Think a third time...

Andres
 
I have transformed CentOS desktops into Fedora desktops (not for the faint of heart, but certainly possible) and done some other crazy stuff now and then, but I would indeed certainly not recommend doing an OS upgrade on a live (and remote) server.

The easiest way to move to a new OS is using the Migration Manager to move all your data to another server. The other way is to make sure you have good backups and just reinstall the OS and then restore all your data.

The first approach has the added benefit of having a working install around in case things don't work out using the Migration Manager.
 
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