linux fedora 15 to 16 upgrade
We’ve been running linux fedora 15 on our house server for some time… too long apparently as support for it and the updates that go along with it stopped on 2012 June 30th.
One of the issues why we did not update sooner to Fedora 16 or now 17, is that it is an old system, that when first installed put in a /boot partition of only 100mb. At the time (10 years back) it was plenty of space. Modern installations now use 500mb.
It took a few hours to work around that problem.
Basically it involved using Gparted to copy the 100mb boot partition to the end of the used space on the drive, expand it to 1000mb, reboot and have the entire system fail to start.
Another hour with live disks to try to fix Grub also failed.
Finally what worked was booting into the Fedora 16 DVD (after replacing the older DVD-ROM that would not boot the disk) and allowing it to reinstall the boot sectors and grub2 while doing the general upgrade.
An hour later the system restarted into Fedora 16. Another hour for the 900Mb of updates and it was back up and running. Several services were not running (httpd, named, dhcpd, etc) and it took some more time to fix those and get them to autostart as well.
I even tried to upgrade again to Fedora 17 but it ran into some python problems in the initial sections of startup into the upgrade.
I downloaded a newer version of it in the hopes that this problem has been solved, burned the .ISO to a DVD but have not yet had time to test it.
Another couple of hours was spent trying to expand the LVM partitions volumes and groups when the initial error was “not enough extents”
In the end, I created a new primary partition in the free space at the end of the drive, gave it type 8E (LVM), then used various lvm commands to create a space, attach to the group and presto chango, the root directory went from 18gb to 70gb.
A reboot to confirm it works and the system was back up and running normally.
Later this week we’ll try the Fedora 17 upgrade 🙂