Upgrading from 10.0 to 10.3

On Feb 13, 7:46 am, taco <trala....TakeThisOut@joepie.nl> wrote:
> houghi wrote:
>
> Houghi is often very helpful with good advice, but here he's wrong. I did
> exactly this upgrade today (10.0 to 10.3) on a machine which is mostly used
> for webservices. The upgrade went flawless (Dell 64 bit). Ofcourse some
> configuration scripts for apache need to be scanned and some obscure
> software. My advice: make a backup of you important files, the /etc
> configuration scripts, mysql databases other important stuff and put the
> dvd in to install 10.3 directly.
> taco
>
> > Roger wrote:
> >> Hi
>
> >> I've a Dell Latitude that I want to take from 10.0 to 10.3. Should I
> >> just go for it with the 10.3 iso DVD image, or would it be better/
> >> safer to go 10.0 -> 10.1 -> 10.2 -> 10.3
>
> > If you have not changed anything, added no extra software, then the slow
> > way is the way to go.
> > If you have added software and it breaks half way during the process,
> > you just wasted time.
>
> > What I would do is backup and then a new install. I always do that. I
> > even have a seperate partition for it all the time.
>
> > houghi

I have had a rather mixed success with upgrades. If the configuration
is not overly complex, installing from scratch may be an easier route
here.

Boris.

houghi wrote:
Houghi is often very helpful with good advice, but here he's wrong. I did
exactly this upgrade today (10.0 to 10.3) on a machine which is mostly used
for webservices. The upgrade went flawless (Dell 64 bit). Ofcourse some
configuration scripts for apache need to be scanned and some obscure
software. My advice: make a backup of you important files, the /etc
configuration scripts, mysql databases other important stuff and put the
dvd in to install 10.3 directly.
taco
> Roger wrote:
>> Hi
>>
>> I've a Dell Latitude that I want to take from 10.0 to 10.3. Should I
>> just go for it with the 10.3 iso DVD image, or would it be better/
>> safer to go 10.0 -> 10.1 -> 10.2 -> 10.3
>
> If you have not changed anything, added no extra software, then the slow
> way is the way to go.
> If you have added software and it breaks half way during the process,
> you just wasted time.
>
> What I would do is backup and then a new install. I always do that. I
> even have a seperate partition for it all the time.
>
> houghi

taco wrote:
<snip>
Please do not toppost.
>>> I've a Dell Latitude that I want to take from 10.0 to 10.3. Should I
>>> just go for it with the 10.3 iso DVD image, or would it be better/
>>> safer to go 10.0 -> 10.1 -> 10.2 -> 10.3
>>
>> If you have not changed anything, added no extra software, then the slow
>> way is the way to go.
>> If you have added software and it breaks half way during the process,
>> you just wasted time.
>>
>> What I would do is backup and then a new install. I always do that. I
>> even have a seperate partition for it all the time.

> Houghi is often very helpful with good advice, but here he's wrong.

No, I was not. He asked what the better way was between two choice and I
said it to be the slow way. The reason that is th better way is because
that is the tested way. If you did no changes on your machine, this will
work in almost any case.

However if you have added extra software, then it could fail at any
upgrade, making the fact wether this happens from 10.1 to 10.2 or from
10.0 to 10.3 irrelevant as the end result is most likely the same.

If a 10.0 to 10.3 works, then so would have an update the slow way.

> I did exactly this upgrade today (10.0 to 10.3) on a machine which is
> mostly used for webservices. The upgrade went flawless (Dell 64 bit).

Great. I did not say that it would not work. The better way is still to
go step by step when the question is between the ones given above. The
fact that you did something that was not tested and it worked is great,
but more luck then wisdom.

> Ofcourse some configuration scripts for apache need to be scanned and
> some obscure software. My advice: make a backup of you important
> files, the /etc configuration scripts, mysql databases other important
> stuff and put the dvd in to install 10.3 directly.

Uh, so you give the same advice as I do, fail to answer the question and
I am wrong? Strange.

houghi
--
Dr. Walter Gibbs: Won't that be grand? Computers and the programs
will start thinking and the people will stop.
-- Tron (1982)

houghi wrote:

>
> Great. I did not say that it would not work. The better way is still to
> go step by step when the question is between the ones given above. The
> fact that you did something that was not tested and it worked is great,
> but more luck then wisdom.

Certainly not luck. I did it many many times with only minor problems. New
installations need also quite a lot of work. (Agreed 9.x to 10 was a
pita.).

>
>> Ofcourse some configuration scripts for apache need to be scanned and
>> some obscure software. My advice: make a backup of you important
>> files, the /etc configuration scripts, mysql databases other important
>> stuff and put the dvd in to install 10.3 directly.
>
> Uh, so you give the same advice as I do, fail to answer the question and
> I am wrong? Strange.
>
What I meant is: upgrade; not a new install. If it doesn't work you can
still do it. Not much time lost. Our system was back in the air within 2
hours and the only problem was a small svn and php5 apache config file. A
new install would have taken considerably more time for this multi user
system.

On Wed, 13 Feb 2008, taco wrote:-

>houghi wrote:
>
>>
>> Great. I did not say that it would not work. The better way is still to
>> go step by step when the question is between the ones given above. The
>> fact that you did something that was not tested and it worked is great,
>> but more luck then wisdom.
>
>Certainly not luck. I did it many many times with only minor problems. New
>installations need also quite a lot of work. (Agreed 9.x to 10 was a
>pita.).

I've upgraded three systems to 10.3. Two were using 10.0 and one was
using 9.3. The hardest one was the second 10.0 system, and the reason
that one was hardest was because it had a mix of SATA and IDE drives, as
well as many third-party packages. However, with some effort, all three
systems are now running 10.3 and, despite the big version jumps, they
are all running just fine.

Going back to the slow method that houghi recommended, that is the only
route tested by SUSE/Novell. While others may work, and do indeed work
if you know what you're doing and can handle what may end up becoming a
dependency hell, it's not suitable for those that are novices. Also,
there are a couple of points going the slow route that may trip people
up.

With 10.2, SUSE/Novell changed from using selections to patterns. While
this may not seem like much of a change, it does mean there isn't the
same one to one mapping that existed in previous versions.

With 10.3, SUSE/Novell changed to use libata to handle the hard drive
systems, as has (almost?) all the other distributions. This may cause
some problems, or it may not.

In my case, this use of libata resulted in my having to make quite a few
changes to both the device.map file, /etc/fstab and /boot/grub/menu.lst,
because the changes weren't automatically made. What was even worse was
the device I expected to become /dev/sda, namely /dev/hda, became
/dev/sdb and the SATA device that was /dev/sda remained the same. If I
hadn't been paying a lot of attention, I could have delete things I
didn't want to.

I know I'm not the only one that has been almost tripped up by this, so
it is something to watch for when doing a 10.[0-2] -> 10.3 upgrade.

>What I meant is: upgrade; not a new install. If it doesn't work you can
>still do it. Not much time lost.

An hour or two for the first aborted upgrade, followed by another hour
or two for the fresh install.

>Our system was back in the air within 2
>hours and the only problem was a small svn and php5 apache config file.

Now that's where I didn't have a problem but, then again, I only had PHP
enabled before the upgrade. Oh, and a wiki, and a Lifetype blog that
gets virtually no updates, the last one being all about how the second
10.0 -> 10.3 upgrade went

>A
>new install would have taken considerably more time for this multi user
>system.

Why? Back up everything, just as you said before, then perform the fresh
install. The installation would have picked up all the users that were
present, retaining all their settings and $HOME directories, and then
you could reconfigure the system using the backups for reference.

While I didn't bother blogging it, that's exactly what I did with my
last "upgrade". That was the result of a motherboard failing, and being
replaced with a new one using a dual-cored 64bit processor. Since it
would be a waste to run an old 9.0 system with a single processor kernel
on such hardware, I performed a fresh install.

In this case, the backups were the original drive, which was left in the
system but shifted from the primary IDE channel to the secondary. A new
hard drive was put in as primary master, and that received the fresh
installation. The contents of the old home directory were moved between
stage one and stage two of the installation and, after the installation
was completed, the new configurations were edited to match the old.
Finally, after everything was set up almost like before the upgrade, I
wiped the old drive, added an LVM partition and then added it to the LVM
group that existed on the new drive.


Regards,
David Bolt

--
www.davjam.org/lifetype/ www.distributed.net: OGR@100Mnodes, RC5-72@15Mkeys
SUSE 10.1 32bit | openSUSE 10.2 32bit | openSUSE 10.3 32bit | openSUSE 11.0a1
SUSE 10.1 64bit | openSUSE 10.2 64bit | openSUSE 10.3 64bit
RISC OS 3.6 | TOS 4.02 | openSUSE 10.3 PPC |RISC OS 3.11

taco wrote:
> houghi wrote:
>
>>
>> Great. I did not say that it would not work. The better way is still to
>> go step by step when the question is between the ones given above. The
>> fact that you did something that was not tested and it worked is great,
>> but more luck then wisdom.
>
> Certainly not luck. I did it many many times with only minor problems. New
> installations need also quite a lot of work. (Agreed 9.x to 10 was a
> pita.).

If something works without any official testing being done, I call that
'more luck then wisdom'.

>> Uh, so you give the same advice as I do, fail to answer the question and
>> I am wrong? Strange.
>>
> What I meant is: upgrade; not a new install. If it doesn't work you can
> still do it. Not much time lost. Our system was back in the air within 2
> hours and the only problem was a small svn and php5 apache config file. A
> new install would have taken considerably more time for this multi user
> system.

Was that billable time? Otherwise, what did you do all the time.
And I can imagine it would not have cost more time to do a new install.
Each system is multi-user (I hope).

Here is how I do a new installation.
1) See that I have a partition available of abut 10GB
2) Instal the new system with everything, including /home on that
partition.
3) See that I can still boot into the old system
4) Mount /home and all other partitions
5) test run and see what I need

A new running system thus takes me about 1 hour. As an extra, I can
still go back to the old system instantly if things go completely wrong
for whatever reason, as my old / is still there. (as well as the
backups, obviously)

I would think that timewise a new installation and an upgrade would take
about the same time. To me the new install is always better, because I
can go back if I do want to do that. I always have a dual boot. Current
and previous. My previous / is on /media/sdb1:
houghi@penne : cat /media/sdb1/etc/SuSE-release
openSUSE 10.2 (i586)
VERSION = 10.2

So even if I utterly and completely destroy all data on the / partition,
I will have a running system within 2 minutes. I can then do either a
new instalation again, or work with the old version, depending on what
the time presure is.

The times that I want a restore, I urgently want to look something up
online. Boot the old one and I am there.

Obviously you can do somthing similar with an update, but it wouild be
much harder and would waste time.

So that is the reason why I prefer the new installation.

houghi
--
Dr. Walter Gibbs: Won't that be grand? Computers and the programs
will start thinking and the people will stop.
-- Tron (1982)