Hello,

I have a web server running FC7 and I wonder how to update it with FC8.

It's a dedicated server in a data-center, I have full control on it but
of course I can access it only with a putty session over SSH.

I find how to process when one is in front of the machine but I fail to
find any guidelines for a remote update.

Thanks for any links, tips.

Sylvain.

> I have a web server running FC7 and I wonder how to update it with FC8.
>
> It's a dedicated server in a data-center, I have full control on it but of
> course I can access it only with a putty session over SSH.
>
> I find how to process when one is in front of the machine but I fail to
> find any guidelines for a remote update.

Well, there is no special remote-update ways to do it in as it is the same
steps as if you were in front of the server. I will though not recommend
doing such a drastic thing from remote if it is a vital server that only can
have a periodic reboot once in a while. I have previousely updated from 6 to
7 (on my private server) but it failed totally even though I tried the exact
same a couple of days earlier without any problems.

In a serious production enviroment you don't upgrade - you patch and
reinstall.

John wrote on 18/02/2008 19:56:
>> I have a web server running FC7 and I wonder how to update it with FC8.
>> [...]
>
> Well, there is no special remote-update ways to do it in as it is the same
> steps as if you were in front of the server. I will though not recommend
> doing such a drastic thing from remote if it is a vital server that only can
> have a periodic reboot once in a while. I have previousely updated from 6 to
> 7 (on my private server) but it failed totally even though I tried the exact
> same a couple of days earlier without any problems.
>
> In a serious production enviroment you don't upgrade - you patch and
> reinstall.

fully agree with your point.
my concern was the bug recently found in vmsplice, fortunately it
appears that the kernel release 2.6.23.15-80 (Feb, 11th) does fix the
issue. a simple kernel update & reboot have solved my problem.

Sylvain.

On Mon, 18 Feb 2008 22:36:13 +0100, Sylvain wrote:

> John wrote on 18/02/2008 19:56:
>>> I have a web server running FC7 and I wonder how to update it with
>>> FC8. [...]
>>
>> Well, there is no special remote-update ways to do it in as it is the
>> same steps as if you were in front of the server. I will though not
>> recommend doing such a drastic thing from remote if it is a vital
>> server that only can have a periodic reboot once in a while. I have
>> previousely updated from 6 to 7 (on my private server) but it failed
>> totally even though I tried the exact same a couple of days earlier
>> without any problems.
>>
>> In a serious production enviroment you don't upgrade - you patch and
>> reinstall.
>
> fully agree with your point.
> my concern was the bug recently found in vmsplice, fortunately it
> appears that the kernel release 2.6.23.15-80 (Feb, 11th) does fix the
> issue. a simple kernel update & reboot have solved my problem.
>
> Sylvain.

Fedora 7 is still supported so there is no reason to upgrade your server
to F8, just do a yum -y update to get the updates to 7. When you do get
around to putting on a new distro I would suggest that you switch to
CentOS5. Fedora is the wrong choice for a server that you can't lay your
hands on easily. You need a distro that will be supported for years,
CentOS5 will be supported for at least another 5 years.

General Schvantzkopf wrote on 18/02/2008 23:12:
>
> Fedora 7 is still supported so there is no reason to upgrade your server
> to F8, just do a yum -y update to get the updates to 7.

as explained it what I did.

> When you do get
> around to putting on a new distro I would suggest that you switch to
> CentOS5. Fedora is the wrong choice for a server that you can't lay your
> hands on easily.

just your own feeling ?
a lot of data-center rent shared or dedicated servers running FC.

> You need a distro that will be supported for years,
> CentOS5 will be supported for at least another 5 years.

the server is contracted on a yearly basis.

Sylvain.

On Tue, 19 Feb 2008 15:41:33 +0100, Sylvain wrote:

> General Schvantzkopf wrote on 18/02/2008 23:12:
>>
>> Fedora 7 is still supported so there is no reason to upgrade your
>> server to F8, just do a yum -y update to get the updates to 7.
>
> as explained it what I did.
>
>> When you do get
>> around to putting on a new distro I would suggest that you switch to
>> CentOS5. Fedora is the wrong choice for a server that you can't lay
>> your hands on easily.
>
> just your own feeling ?
> a lot of data-center rent shared or dedicated servers running FC.
>
>> You need a distro that will be supported for years, CentOS5 will be
>> supported for at least another 5 years.
>
> the server is contracted on a yearly basis.
>
> Sylvain.

The reason for using a stable distro on a server is that it minimizes the
amount of work that you have to do to keep it working. Fedora is great if
you don't mind the work it takes to maintain it. Fedora is only supported
for a year, the RPM repositories frequently break because they have a
cavalier attitude about introducing dependency conflicts, there are
hundreds of megabytes of updates per week, and there is no way to
reliably upgrade from one version to the next. A stable distro like
CentOS, which is RHEL, is maintained for seven years from the date of the
introduction of the RHEL version. That means that you never have to worry
about doing an upgrade. The only updates are bug fixes and security
patches which reduces the number of updates by a couple of orders of
magnitude, I just did an update on my CentOS5 machine, there were 2
updates totaling 2MB, I updated one of my Fedora 8 machines last night
and there were 140 updates, and that machine had been updated a few days
ago so those 140 were new in that last three days. I've also never seen
the kinds of dependency conflicts in CentOS that are routine in Fedora,
that's because Redhat is careful about what they introduce into RHEL. The
thing that their customers are paying them for is to eliminate the
headaches in maintaining their servers. It's a pain in the ass when you
have to resolve a dependency conflict on a single machine, but at least
it's doable, if you had 10000 machines it would be impossible.

The downside of CentOS is that it's old. CentOS5 is basically Fedora Core
6 so it will work fine on hardware that was current when FC6 was current,
but not so much on the latest hardware. However server boxes change much
more slowly and in a more compatible manner then desktop and laptop
machines so that tends not to be as much of a problem. You also don't
care about having the latest version of Gnome or the latest applications
on a server, it's running with X off so that doesn't matter. Commercial
applications are all certified for RHEL so they will always work on
CentOS and the free server applications that come with RHEL are generally
just fine.

All in all you are much better off running CentOS on a remote server than
running Fedora.

General Schvantzkopf wrote on 19/02/2008 17:23:
>
> The reason for using a stable distro on a server is that it minimizes the
> amount of work that you have to do to keep it working. [...]

Thanks for explanation, I also hate the update process of FC.
I'm only concerned by security updates [1] and so far I didn't find a
way to only update "security modules" (low level modules for which
vulnerability will actually affect the whole system); so I only update
the kernel.

[1]: it's a web server, for most of the services (apache, PHP, mysql,
ftpd) I manage myself updates if required (and after long verification).

> The downside of CentOS is that it's old. CentOS5 is basically Fedora Core
> 6 so it will work fine on hardware that was current when FC6 was current,
> but not so much on the latest hardware. However server boxes change much
> more slowly and in a more compatible manner then desktop and laptop
> machines so that tends not to be as much of a problem. You also don't
> care about having the latest version of Gnome or the latest applications
> on a server, it's running with X off so that doesn't matter.

definitively.

> Commercial
> applications are all certified for RHEL so they will always work on
> CentOS and the free server applications that come with RHEL are generally
> just fine.
> All in all you are much better off running CentOS on a remote server than
> running Fedora.

Thanks for info. I will give it (rel. 5.1) a try.

Cheers,
Sylvain.