Linux Fedora 16 upgrade fail
I have a couple of old linux fedora 16 servers that are now longer supported, and do not get updates any longer.
They must be upgraded to at least Fedora 17 or better yet, Fedora 18.
I’ve tried a few times over the last year to upgrade, but always ran into issues that defied troubleshooting, especially on a production server when you have a very tiny window to get the job done and back online again.
This is a log of the issues upgrading the first… It was a good learning experience and that means the second one should go that much better tomorrow.
11:18 EDT
As root, in a terminal, run preupgrade-cli for the command line version. It will tell you what is available and you rerun the command as such:
preupgrade-cli “Fedora 17 (Beefy Miracle)”
1st Major error: can’t find the file /etc/sysconfig/i18n
a bunch of google searchs leads me to create the file manually with a text editor vi
LANG=”en_US.UTF-8″
SUPPORTED=”en_US.UTF-8:en_US:en”
SYSFONT=”iatarcyrheb-sun16″
11:28 EDT
reboot into fedora16 as root run preupgrade-cli “Fedora 17 (Beefy Miracle)”
11:33 EDT
start downloads 1.1Gb in 1569 packages
11:53 EDT
complete download, reboot choose preupgrade
ERROR //anothercomputer/mountpoint
reboot into fedora16, vi /etc/fstab and comment out external mounts
11:58 EDT
reboot into preupgrade
fails at /usr merge scripts
symlinks are the problem, use this command to delete all of the symlinks affecting the /usr merge
find ./ -mount -lname /etc/\* -delete
12:06 EDT
reboot into preupgrade, gets past /usr merge script problem! starting upgrade of 1569 packages
12:23 EDT about 50% done
12:33 EDT about 66% done
12:49 EDT completed… now in cleanup phase
13:05 restart into Fedora 17. Yay!
13:10 revise the yay to an “oh crap”. The boot progress indicator sticks near 100%, it is not pingable from the outside and it just doesn’t work.
see a typo in the i18n file from before, boot from a fedora 17 live cd and mount and edit the file,
restart again… the edit does not seem to have stuck.
ok. shut down, put in the backup drive cloned earlier in the morning and call it a day.