Upgrading from FC5/Plesk 8.1

[kelso]

I was doing some reading about getting this server up to date, and from what i've read, people say to go to centos 5.3 which with yum is a pretty straight forward upgrade from FC5.

My first question, is this even feasible? Would it make more sense to build a new server, install latest version of plesk, and migrate accounts?

Next: if I upgrade from FC5 to CentOS 5.3, is this going to break Plesk?

Below are the notes I found for updating the installed distro.

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Fedora Core 5 is so old, that almost everything, starting from the init
system has changed a couple of times. I'd do a fresh install by
formatting the / partition (you do have a separate /home, don't you?).
In this case waiting for Fedora 11 may be worthwhile.

The other option is to yum update to CentOS 5.3, which should work as
easily as removing the fedora-release and fedora-release-notes RPMs
# rpm -e fedora-release fedora-release notes
installing centos-release and centos-release-notes
# rpm -Uvh
http://mirrors.kernel.org/centos/5/os/i386/CentOS/centos-release-5-3.el5.centos.1.i386.rpm http://mirrors.kernel.org/centos/5/os/i386/CentOS/centos-release-notes-5.3-3.i386.rpm

Also, installing the Fedora EPEL repository is a good idea.
# rpm -Uvh
http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/epel/5/i386/epel-release-5-3.noarch.rpm

Then you need to:
# yum clean all (or just yum clean, if the former didn't work)
# yum -y update (you may need to remove 3rd party repositories you've
used in Fedora 5)

After this, reboot since glibc has been updated. Finally, check what is
not available in the repos with
# yum list extras
>From these, you should
1. if the installed package is newer than the one in the repo: remove
the installed package, and install a replacement with yum
2. remove (obsoleted) packages that are not available in the
repositories

 

[fizz]

Well, lack of support has always been a problem, and still is. Going to move to cPanel where they actually help you, rather then trying to buy more companies which they cant offer support for.

 

[atomicturtle]

Ideally if you're going to do a migration like this I would get a 2nd server and do a migration in parallel. That would be the safest route. Assuming thats not an option, before you dive into a "hot" upgrade like this I highly highly recommend doing a few practice runs in a virtual machine if you can.

For the most part, architecturally FC5 isnt a lot different than CentOS 5, but there will probably be a few gotchas in there you cant predict so the practice upgrades will be invaluable. I used to do the hot upgrades all the time myself, but in the end opted for the parallel migration just to limit the down time involved.