### Redhat 7.2 upgrade to Redhat 9.1 without booting from a disk

From Nick Pringle

Answered By Thomas Adam, Faber Fedor, Dan Wilder, Heather Stern, Ben Okopnik

Hi

I rent a Redhat 7.2 system installed on a host machine 'in a galaxy far, far away'. I want to upgrade to Redhat 9.1 but cannot follow the prescribe route because I cannot boot from floppy or cd the way Redhat say to do the upgrade. I can, however, always boot from an emergency ram disk and then mount the real system to work on it. When booted via this emergency RAM disk I have full net access and have ftp access to all the Redhat CDs etc. Is there any way of running the upgrade procedure 'manually'?

Regards Nick Pringle

> [Thomas] How do you mean by installing it "manually"? The RH installer allows you the choice of doing either http/ftp/cdrom install, depending on what you choose.

> Are you trying to say then, that you want to only upgrade certain packages on your system (N.B. This is not a good idea, since as this is a higher version than the version currently on your system, trying to upgrade certain packages leads to "dependency hell"). Cf:

> > http://www.linuxgazette.com/issue71/tag/3.html

> Could you try and provide more details. Thanks.

> [Faber] That's the problem he has, Thomas. The box is "far far away" and he can't just "put in the CD, boot the machine, and choose http/ftp/cdrom" after selecting his language mouse and keyboard. He isn't at the machine.

> So he ants to know if he can manually start the installation process, i.e. not reboot the machine.

> It's a good question and I haven't found a solution yet.

> [Dan] Maybe he shoulda used Debian.

> I routinely upgrade Debian systems one major release level via an ssh login. So far not "far far away", but without touching the box being upgraded, yes. At one point I upgraded a running web server this way, with only a fifteen minute interruption to its services.

> Which proves such a thing can be done. Now whether other distributions allow for it ...

> [Heather] I am a lot more careful about letting debian do its automagical thing if I know I can't get over to that machine and whack it one. There have been a few times in my life, when playing with Debian's idea of the leading edge, I took too careless a leap and added that "b" noise to the word. Ouchie.

> Essentially, I use a curses-mode selector such as aptitude. I update, and I pick some very basic stuff to make sure the raw parts are definitely grabbed first. This generally means dpkg, debconf and its related parts - libc and things having to do with login, such as the shell, pam, and so on. All in all I've usually done 4 or 5 small sets of critical utilities (not always members of "base" - sometimes in admin, or related to the actual purpose of the system). Before anything whose improper behavior would give me the willies, I use dpkg-repack to save an instance of its current bits before I allow it to upgrade. Yeah, I bail out of the selector a lot. But when I finally am happy with how perl settled in, I won't need to worry about the rest of it.

> [Ben] 1) Install the system on a local machine; configure and tweak.

> 2) Copy everything across (FTP or whatever) to a new partition on the remote machine.

> 3) Carefully adjust the remote "lilo.conf" to boot the new "installation" on the next reboot.

> Anybody see a problem with this scenario? Sure, some stuff is going to require tweaking afterwards - but that's true of any new install.

> [Dan] Sure sounds a lot like the safest upgrade procedure for what's still, for quirky reasons, my favorite distribution ... Slackware.

> It'd be nice if the ever-so-much featureful RH could do better.

Hi. Thanks for the prompt reply.

> [Thomas] All part of the service, sir!

I recently upgraded the machine in my office from Redhat Linux 7.2 to Redhat 9.1. No trouble. I just booted from the CD, click the options in graphics mode and did the upgrade. So I've been through the process on a PC I can touch.

> [Thomas] Yep, installers are becoming easier and easier. I am sure people like Jim Dennis and Ben Okopnik (resident on this list) will remember the days of black and white, and having to use the "friendly" program fdisk

But I am trying out a hosting package provided by a company called Oneandone. It's a very attractive solution because they have fast access, I won't have to use a machine and UPS of my own and they are cheap! It's $50 a month. It's on www.oneandone.co.uk as a Root Server 1. I live in Britain,

> [Thomas] Well, well, well. I live in England too Small world, eh? I have heard of oneandone, but never really looked any further, until now

I think the machine might be in Germany but I'm not actually sure. I don't know what sort or hardware they run but I am simply unable to detect if it is virtual in any way. Even the hardware reporting at boot time says it is a real machine. I imagine they have racks of tiny machines with only processor, memory, Realtek netcard and a hard disk.

> [Thomas] A reasonable assumption.

I get Redhat Linux 7.2 installed but very limited support! When I point out to them that Redhat 7.2 becomes obsolete in November they agree it will but cannot upgrade my Server package. To use the service I really need to know I can upgrade at some time.

> Hmm, I am going to be picky here and say that NO Linux distibution becomes obsolete. Yes, some of the programs will be at a lower version number than some more recent ones, but as long as it works and does what you want it to do -- there is no reason to upgrade at all. That is perhaps the selling point of Linux for me over Microsoft --- you don't, nor are you forced to upgrade. If it works, keep it. Heck, I know some people who are still running kernel 1.x.x

> [Heather] I'll have to agree; I've safely let systems lay with only the important service ever being updated, behind a nice little firewall whose kernel is updated more often.

I am truly remote. I ONLY have SSH access. I cannot boot from anything other than the hard disk of the remote machine. When I upgraded my local machine in the office I booted with the Redhat CD1 on my local CD drive. As far as I can see Redhat upgrade requires you to BOOT from either a floppy or CD. If I could boot from the CD I know I could choose ftp/cd/or local hard disk but I cannot do the very first step.

> [Thomas] I see your problem If you have SSH support, then what I would be inclined to do is try and run a program called "up2date", like so:

>     up2date -u

> essentially this locates a RH server and updates old packages that you have on your current remote system with newer ones. It does not though perform a dist-upgrade. I suppose that you could look at "up2date" as a very childlike form of Debian's "apt-get".

> So, this is a half-way solution to your problem.

> Another, perhaps more direct approach is to use the utility "wget" download the ".iso" files, and mount them on a loopback, such that you can then issue:

>     rpm -ivh *.rpm

Sorry to drag it on a bit but I hope the above clarifies the situation.

If you haven't lost the will to live by now thank you very much for listening.

Incidentally I agree that partial upgrades and going through each of the RPMs one at a time will result in "dependency hell" which is why I need a 3rd route.

> [Heather] There you have it folks; if anyone has had their own successes in such distant climes, maybe you'd like to write us an article someday soon?