FC5 to FC7

[techsharp]

Sorry pharoh - I read the first post incorrectly.

I am glad this worked as now I think I just made my work load a ton easier! I just have to upgrade my FC6 box to FC7 and do the same for my xen boxs.

Can you post your upgrade instructions?

Thank you!

[adhodgson]

Hi,

If you can't go with RHEL, could you go with CentOS? Its the same as RHEL,, but not compiled/supported by RedHat. The updates will be around for a long time (CentOS5). I am using this in the DR environment, where the boss doesn't want to purchase RHEL subscription. I would go CentOS every time over FC.

I had tared up /var/opt/scalix on the RHEL4 system, thenn copied it back to the RHEL5 DR system and it worked fine.

If we can't get funding for RHEL subscriptionn next year I will probably use it as an excuse to upgrade to V5 on CentOS (though will try to keep the RHEL obviously).

Partition wise, I usually create swap as 2GB, have a 100MB /boot partition, around 6GB for the / partition, and the rest for /var/opt/scalix. In the production environment I have a RAID-10 array, and have 400GB split between the live and backup Scalix partition, with enough space for doing LVM snapshots. I am very paranoid about having space for longterm growth of the system (we are just over 80GB with 200 users currently - that is probably small for most people), and for doing consistant backups.

Andrew

[techsharp]

Andrew,

The CEO wants us to use Fedora 7 as of right now - so thats what I will be doing ;p In the meantime my plan is to get a secondary server setup - and transfer /var/opt/scalix - do I install Scalix before transferring over that directory or after?

Then I have to setup the real mail server with FC7 and then re-transfer the files back over.

My question is what is the best way to upgrade the 'real' mail server from FC5 to FC7. I know you can do it through yum, or should I just re-install the entire OS?

[pharoh]

I use the dvd. (this has worked without problem on 7 servers now 5 virtual 2 physical)

1. boot from the dvd and run an UPGRADE
2. stop scalix-tomcat ldapmapper scalix and scalix-postgres services
3. remove the scalix db with the 11.2 installer (ie: select remove scalix components and ONLY check scalix db)
4. install scalix 11.2
5. reboot

[techsharp]

I use the dvd. (this has worked without problem on 7 servers now 5 virtual 2 physical)

1. boot from the dvd and run an UPGRADE
2. stop scalix-tomcat ldapmapper scalix and scalix-postgres services
3. remove the scalix db with the 11.2 installer (ie: select remove scalix components and ONLY check scalix db)
4. install scalix 11.2
5. reboot

Excellent! Thank you very much

Also how long does it take to do the upgrade? I have to upgrade the base machine and then the virtual machine.

[pharoh]

the vm's are done on a host machine with 2 intel 5150's and 4gb of ram the vm's have 1024 of ram each and it takes ~45mins + 30mins for testing & reboot. you will also want ~1gb free on the root partition.

P.S. there are 4 scalix boxes on there for various companies.

[techsharp]

OK thank you very much - I will let you know how it turns out.

[pharoh]

Gook luck! I think you will be fine. Just make sure to have a good backup!

[techsharp]

Thanks, I have a backup - just ported all var/opt/scalix over to another server in case anything happens ;p

[techsharp]

One problem I am running into is all my VM's are xen boxs and they do not let you boot from cd/DVD. There is no bios screen etc..

Any suggestions on how I should do the upgrade?

Thanks

[pharoh]

not off the top of my head. We use vmware for all of our virtualization. I will putz with it though and see if I come up with anything.

[techsharp]

Thanks,

I have been messing with it here and there and it really sucks that you can not boot from the DVD - and I really do not want to have to make a whole new virtual machine and then transfer everything over.

If you come up with anything let me know.

[pharoh]

I was looking around and found this:

http://lists.xensource.com/archives/htm ... 00669.html

looks like a very good starting point. And at least throught the searching I did sugests that a text mode upgrade is possible

[techsharp]

I was looking around and found this:

http://lists.xensource.com/archives/htm ... 00669.html

looks like a very good starting point. And at least throught the searching I did sugests that a text mode upgrade is possible

Interesting - I will have to give that a shot- I can make an image of the FC7 boot cd and then do an NFS install -

I will give it a shot - thanks for the help.

[techsharp]

Found out you need 'HVM' support to do this and the xm image with Scalix does not. Back to the drawing board.