Date: Wed, 10 Jun 1998 03:37:50 -0400
To: lwn@lwn.net
From: Eric Kidd <eric.kidd@pobox.com>
Subject: More 5.1 upgrade experiences

Since I last wrote, I've upgraded two more RedHat 5.0 systems to 5.1. The
first was a laptop, the second our production server.

The laptop was completely painless, with the exception of AcceleratedX.
Here's my advice:

 1) Make sure you restore all X-related *.rpmsave files. Installing
    AcceleratedX apparently modifies a whole bunch of things, which
    RedHat moves out of the way when it upgrades.
 2) I don't remember the details of this for certain, and can't check
    anymore, but make sure that the symlinks /usr/X11R6/bin/X and
    /etc/X11/X point somewhere reasonable. (I think it was Xwrappers and
    Xaccel, respectively.)

I showed the owner of the laptop how to switch networking profiles with
Linuxconf, which caused much happiness. That's a *really* sweet feature.

Upgrading our production server from 5.0 to 5.1, on the other hand, was a
disaster. First I discovered that RedHat's installer does an Extremely
Wrong Thing when confronted with a custom compiled kernel--upgrades it
anyway, thus disabling lots of tricky hardware on the server.

After I got the server to boot into single-user mode, I recompiled the
kernel and got the multiple SCSI host adapters working again.
Unfortunately, Apache was now looking for /home/httpd/html/conf/httpd.conf
instead of /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf, and our lousy 3c509 card wasn't
working (although the gorgeous 3c9xx continued merrily along its way).
Turns out the RedHat's upgrade procedure eats /etc/lilo.conf whole, and
completely forgets any kernel parameters or other special settings you had.

It would appear that upgrading from 5.0 to 5.1 works very well on simple
systems, but can go completely awry on systems with entertaining hardware
or software configuration. Generally, the more you've hacked it, the
messier it could be.

Good reasons to upgrade:

 * You want the newest versions of everything. RedHat 5.1 contains lots
   of useful upgrades in one convenient place.
 * You want Linuxconf, especially for laptops or remote administration.
 * You haven't changed your existing system much.
 * You've changed lots of low-level details about your system, but have
   time to work through the upgrade.

Cheers,
Eric