And There Was Fedora…

…Core 2, that is.

After much downloading and waiting this week, I’ve managed to upgrade both servers (‘ns’ and ‘www’) from RedHat 9 to Fedora Core 2, skipping Core 1 due to the problems experienced last weekend.

I have to admit that, for the most part, the procedure itself went fairly smooth. There have been a few issues, which I’ll outline below. To no surprise, there were considerably more issues with ‘ns’ (the router/nameserver box) than with the other server (‘www’, the real services machine). The first of which was simply the amount of time it took for the upgrade to complete. Needless to say, it was an entire afternoon between the two machines, with ‘ns’ taking over twice as long as ‘www’ with about a 2-hour upgrade time.

The main problems I’ve encountered include:

• ‘ns’ cannot boot from the CD media; this meant that I had to manually create a GRUB entry, booting from the hard drive and running the install directly from the machine itself. This took much longer to set up, since I had to copy the image files across the network to the machine prior to attempting the upgrade.
• ‘ns’, with only 98MB RAM, cannot support the graphical installation process, so was forced to operate in text mode. Since it was running as an upgrade, this was trivial to deal with and not nearly as difficult to deal with as it would be for a complete installation.
• ‘www’ needed to have its XF86Config file updated to support different monitor sync rates (and therefore allow me to use a different monitor than what I normally have — at least during the upgrade). This wasn’t really a problem with the upgrade itself, though. It needed to happen anyway.
• For some reason, on ‘www’ there were some services which popped back to life after the upgrade. I hadn’t removed them completely, but I did disable them from automatically starting at boot. This is trivial to fix, but was a bit annoying for things like SpamAssassin, which takes up heaps of CPU cycles on my little server. Considering I don’t use that machine as a mailserver or filter…
• ‘ns’ was no longer supporting ISA bus devices after the upgrade. I haven’t looked into this much yet…so I’m not sure if it’s the motherboard of ‘ns’ dying slowly but surely (which due to some other issues — namely with the CD-ROM drive and occasionally HDD)…or just the sad nature of upgrades — old stuff can’t be supported forever.
  • The 10MBps NIC (which connects to the DSL modem as the uplink for the network) was no longer recognized by the OS. It was still giving off a link light, though.
  • The sound card (an older SB ISA card) also was no longer recognized. This was not a problem at all, since I never used it anyway.
  • Thankfully I had a spare PCI NIC I can use for a little while until I obtain another cheap PCI NIC to permanently put in the machine.
• Not to my surprise, there were some configuration changes which needed to be carried across. Most notably related to some library symlinking and other sorts of things which were easily fixed with symlinks.
• POP3/IMAP services. Under the older installations (even the one at work I did with FC1), I was working with UW IMAPd which was controlled through Xinetd for POP3. FC2 ships and upgrades with Cyrus-IMAP… I have yet to get this configured properly and downloading mail.
  • I have configured Cyrus-IMAP for basic operations and have managed to get it starting. It’s listening and *:POP3 is ready. I don’t care about IMAP or any of the others.
  • In connecting directly to the POP3 port, I am able to log in, but authentication wasn’t working at all. I managed to fix this a little bit, by at least making sure the sasl utility was doing its thing.
  • Now I still have to configure users and maildrops for said users. More reading and research is required, but in the meantime I can still use Pine to get the log watch reports.

Happily enough, though — Sendmail has seamlessly upgraded and was working right off the bat. So who knows what the problem exactly was last weekend.

But anyway, that’s the bulk of my Saturday afternoon. At least the machines are working for the most part and 99% of services are functioning properly. It’s just the mail delivery left to get configured…and that’s going to take a little bit of work…simply because it’s a utility/program I’ve never used before.

But if it weren’t supposed to be challenging, I wouldn’t do it at all, right?

Until next time…

This post was upgraded to the MZ Online Blog on 8/25/07