Server upgraded to Fedora 6

A long time has passed since Fedora 6 was released, many of the initial bugs have been fixed, so I decided to perform an upgrade of the installation on the server that powers this web site. Everything has gone well, despite the fact that a few strange things happened during the upgrade.

SELinux is set to “enforcing” mode in this system. In order to be on the safe side, I switched it to “permissive” mode before upgrading.

The upgrade from FC5 to FC6 was performed by YUM. The server machine does not have any DVD-rom drive, so I had to copy all the FC6 RPM packages from the Fedora installation DVD to my desktop, create the yum repository metadata as I have described in this post, move the whole repo to the server and create a YUM repository configuration file in /etc/yum.repos.d/. Before doing any actual upgrades, I updated the information inside the repository configuration files, so that the baseurls pointed to the FC6 repos on the RedHat servers.

First of all, I cleaned the stored YUM cache with:

# yum clean all

and then I had it recreated with the following:

# yum makecache

So, having a fresh YUM cache with all the needed metadata about the FC6 repositories, I started with a:

# yum upgrade fedora-release

and

# rpm -ivh http://rpm.livna.org/livna-release-6.rpm

Then, after confirming that the repository configs are OK, I started the actual upgrade with the following in order to upgrade the kernel and the libraries first:

# yum upgrade kernel l\*

And, as soon as the above process finished successfully, a weird thing happened! YUM did not work any more and the following error was displayed:

There was a problem importing one of the Python modules
required to run yum. The error leading to this problem was:

   libgcc_s.so.1: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

After finding this symlink (libgcc_s.so.1) inside the /lib directory, I realized that it pointed to a non-existent library. Having changed into the /lib directory, this was fixed with a:

# ln -sf libgcc_s-4.1.1-20070105.so.1 libgcc_s.so.1

Other than that, I didn’t encounter any issues. First, I upgraded some critical services like httpd, mysqld, postfix etc, so to have enough time to make any necessary changes to their configuration files while the rest of the system was being upgraded.

Note that I did not upgrade yum and rpm (the package) manually at the beginning of the process. This was done deliberately so to have the choice of upgrading it in case anything went wrong. If I had updated it from the beginning and something actually had gone wrong, reverting it back to the older version might not be possible due to dependencies. Of course, this way I missed the new YUM’s increased speed of resolving the dependencies, but I guess it didn’t hurt so much.

So, that was it. I must admit that the whole procedure was more smooth than the day I had upgraded my desktop computer. This is a sign that various issues with the RPM dependencies have been fixed.

If you notice any inconsistency while browsing this website, feel free to contact me.

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