Comments on: Upgrading from RHEL4 to RHEL5 without a CD or a PXE server

By: Jimmy

Jimmy — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 03:31:23 +0000

What we really need is a PXE bootable Anaconda installer with an SSH server built in.

as in some method of specifying in the ks.cfg
What to use as root password,
where to download SSH host keys,
and where to download an authorized_keys file for root to SSH in with and run the install.

Otherwise without console, there’s no way to monitor the upgrade process…

By: justdave

justdave — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 22:24:09 +0000

Shouldn’t be any different. you just have to set grub to default into your anaconda loader, and pray that it works on the first shot, because if it doesn’t, you’ll be SOL without a console. No reason what I described above wouldn’t work without a console though.

By: John

John — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 19:28:12 +0000

OK, if you can pull this off with no PXE server, no CD *and* no console, then I’ll be dancing in the aisles…

By: justdave

justdave — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 22:58:22 +0000

It really wasn’t a lot. The only major thing we’ve run into is rhnsd somehow ends up getting all of its initscript symlinks nuked, so you have to “chkconfig rhnsd –add” in %post to make sure it still checks in with RHN after the upgrade. The others were minor annoyances like lsb-base pulling in avahi-daemon and cups, and enabling them by default — two services I’d rather not have running on an internet-facing host.

By: Peter Robinson

Peter Robinson — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 22:16:13 +0000

Fedora has introduced a ‘preupgrade’ which I would think will be available as part of RHEL 6 whenever it debuts which will basically grab everything it needs to do an anaconda upgrade and pull it onto the local machine and then do the upgrade on reboot.

I’d also be interested in a post outlining the issues you mention in the upgrade from RHEL 4 to 5.