In the past, we discussed the procedure for upgrading Fedora using yum. Ready to try it again for Werewolf?

Grab the new fedora-release and fedora-release-notes to update repos:

Now sit back, relax, and run yum -y upgrade for a couple of hours.

Actually, there was nothing relaxing about it. Yum repeatedly killed itself during the transaction test. If that happens, you might try upgrading sqlite (that’s yum -y upgrade sqlite) before all other packages.

Then I started getting memory alloc errors. I don’t exactly know how I ran out of memory, but I closed my VNC session and tried again through a remote shell. If that doesn’t work, try upgrading bits and pieces instead of everything at once. For example, upgrade perl, then rpm, then python, etc.

I also ran into problems with mismatched checksums. I didn’t want to re-download every last package AGAIN, so I removed pretty much everything in /var/cache/yum except for downloaded packages, and that took care of it. Another way: yum clean dbcache. Oh, and make sure you have a backup of your data first.

Eventually it installed 80 packages, updated 880, and removed 4. (Download size: 776 M)

Since the previous upgrade, I’ve reduced unnecessary packages, but the entire thing still sucked a lot compared to Ubuntu’s upgrade to 7.10.

If you attempted this upgrade, how did it go? Did you run into as many problems?

About Benjamin Perove

Benjamin has been associated with computer technology starting from a very early age, and has contributed to the success of many businesses and enterprises since 2001.

He loves to crush pow at Keystone, play acoustic guitar, climb rocks, and ascend mountains on his road bike.

Benjamin is an Avalanche fan and currently resides in Boulder, Colorado.

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Scenario: FTP user is jailed to their home directory with chroot. FTP user needs to access an external directory (such as www).

Normally you would create a symbolic link in the user’s home directory.

But for some reason, this just doesn’t work with VSFTPD. After fiddling with permissions unsuccessfully for a few minutes, I found a better way.

So you could either do it this way, or use PROFTPD.

About Benjamin Perove

Benjamin has been associated with computer technology starting from a very early age, and has contributed to the success of many businesses and enterprises since 2001.

He loves to crush pow at Keystone, play acoustic guitar, climb rocks, and ascend mountains on his road bike.

Benjamin is an Avalanche fan and currently resides in Boulder, Colorado.

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If you’ve ever gotten to a point where installing RPMs in linux becomes unresponsive, unreliable and/or extremely flaky, you may need to dig a little deeper. Simply killing the yumex/yum/python processes may not be enough. Perhaps a reboot will do the trick, but when you run a server, any downtime whatsoever is unacceptable 99.9% of the time. Your next option–rebuild the RPM database. YUM will (should, rather) then function normally. Do so as stated:

About Benjamin Perove

Benjamin has been associated with computer technology starting from a very early age, and has contributed to the success of many businesses and enterprises since 2001.

He loves to crush pow at Keystone, play acoustic guitar, climb rocks, and ascend mountains on his road bike.

Benjamin is an Avalanche fan and currently resides in Boulder, Colorado.

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As of May 31st, Fedora 7 is available. Even though the project has dropped ‘Core’ from its name, strangely enough the package names still include ‘fc7′. To upgrade from FC6, you can follow these instructions:

1. Make sure your system is up-to-date, and do a yum clean all for a little housekeeping.
2. Install fedora release information as follows:
rpm -Uvh
ftp://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/releases/7/Fedora/i386/os/Fedora/fedora-release-7-3.noarch.rpm
ftp://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/releases/7/Fedora/i386/os/Fedora/fedora-release-notes-7.0.0-1.noarch.rpm
3. If you have yumex installed, open it. Yumex will gather new package information, install/remove, resolve dependencies, etc. Otherwise, initiate yum -y update from the command line.

When performing the upgrade process on my server, it retrieved 2171 packages — about 1.2 gigs. There was a failed dependency with totem, so I removed it because I won’t be using totem on a server.

About Benjamin Perove

Benjamin has been associated with computer technology starting from a very early age, and has contributed to the success of many businesses and enterprises since 2001.

He loves to crush pow at Keystone, play acoustic guitar, climb rocks, and ascend mountains on his road bike.

Benjamin is an Avalanche fan and currently resides in Boulder, Colorado.

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