Upgrade to Fedora 8... risky?

[Basher52]

I think I saw some post of this kinda of question some time ago, but I cant find it now, so I'll ask again.
How risky is it to upgrade from FC6 to Fedora 8?

I have downloaded the DVD and I'm thinking of mounting the image and use an FTP server to conect to and thereby hopefully lower the risk of losing connection.

But my question is, if something happens to the net is there any chance to repair or continue the upgrade?

I have no place to make a backup

[Void Main]

I am not sure what your situation is. Do you not have a DVD drive in the machine you are trying to upgrade or are you trying to upgrade it remotely using YUM because you don't have physical access to it? If the latter is the case I have not upgraded from FC6 to F8 using YUM but I have upgraded from FC6 to F7 using YUM with minor problems. There is one thing I would be careful of trying to upgrade a remote machine from F6 to anything higher. I should say anything that has IDE hard drives. In F7 and above the drives will show up as SCSI rather than IDE drives which means the device names change from /dev/hd?? to /dev/sd??. This can cause problems on boot if the initrd gets created with the old device names or your /etc/fstab uses the hard coded device names rather than the labels. If you have console access and can boot from the DVD and do the upgrade you should have no problem at all.

[Basher52]

oh... boot from the DVD... I sure don't think straight, I'll do this off course.

What I meant before was that I mounted the DVD image and another PC through an image reader and on the drive it created(that now shows the files "inside" the image), use this as the root directory for an ftp server that I later, when upgrading, was connecting to instead of going over the internet to let's say, ftp.sunet.se

OK, I'll boot from the DVD on the server itself, but if something goes wrong with the upgrade, as everything usually does for me, is there any chance to redo the upgrade or do I have only one chance and after that I have to reinstall the whole server from the beginning with all programs in it? and all this just to be able not to burn a DVD and put a DVD player in there, lazy as I am


btw, do you know if ulogd works on F8?
I have that now in FC6, or do I need to change to something else.

[Void Main]

I don't think you should have a problem upgrading but there is always that possibility. I would certainly copy any critical data you absolutely cannot afford to lose to another machine. In all my years of using Linux I have never lost any data or had any issues that I could not resolve on an upgrade but that doesn't mean it can't happen. Regarding ulogd I don't know why it wouldn't work, it's open source right? If it doesn't work we should be able to "make it work".

[Basher52]

Here we go again

I just upgraded the system and it even mounted the IDE drive as SCSI as far as I can see at least, but when trying to recompile the driver for my HighPoint RocketRAID 2340 i got errors:

Code: Select all

make[1]: Entering directory `/usr/src/kernels/2.6.23.1-42.fc8-i686'
  CC [M]  /install/sata_raid/rr2340-linux-src-v1.04/product/rr2340/linux/.build/os_linux.o
/install/sata_raid/rr2340-linux-src-v1.04/product/rr2340/linux/.build/os_linux.c: In function 'os_sd_changed':
/install/sata_raid/rr2340-linux-src-v1.04/product/rr2340/linux/.build/os_linux.c:315: error: implicit declaration of function 'scsi_device_cancel'
make[2]: *** [/install/sata_raid/rr2340-linux-src-v1.04/product/rr2340/linux/.build/os_linux.o] Error 1
make[1]: *** [_module_/install/sata_raid/rr2340-linux-src-v1.04/product/rr2340/linux/.build] Error 2
make[1]: Leaving directory `/usr/src/kernels/2.6.23.1-42.fc8-i686'
make: *** [rr2340.ko] Error 2
[root@ftp linux]#


Info about the driver can be found here: http://www.highpoint-tech.com/USA/bios_rr2340.htm and I use the Open Source Drivers, not the ones for Fedora Core 1-7.
If I remember correctly I didn't get those to work at all, that's why I use the Open Source drivers.


Some info from the README file: (as i read this I figured it would work)

Code: Select all

     - For Linux kernel 2.6 -
 
     On most distributions based on kernel 2.6, an exploded source tree is not
     required to build a driver against the currently in-use kernel. As long
     as the system has kernel headers setup under /lib/modules/`uname -r`/build,
     you can simply run "make" to build the driver.

     If you want to build the driver against a custom kernel source, you must
     setup the kernel source manually and run "make" under kernel source tree
     to setup kernel headers.

     - For Linux kernel 2.4 -
     ...


Can anyone figure this out?

Right now I'm updating the system with the latest packages...

[Basher52]

I googled and found these:

http://forums.fedoraforum.org/archive/i ... 71787.html
http://forum.nas-central.org/viewtopic.php?f=18&p=38898


and after reading those I figured I'll try it and it works
I also have sent an EMail to HighPoint, let's see if they'll answer.

Hope I didn't do anything that makes all the data corrupt
since I have no clue what so ever what I just did, lol

[Basher52]

Hey VoidMain, you think you could take a look at this to see if I made an error on this one?
I don't want to lose an data, you know lol

[Void Main]

I looked at it and probably would have done the same thing you did and personally wouldn't worry about losing data unless you read that someone else had a problem like that.

[Basher52]

You that can understand that code, what is that function supposed to do?
For me it looks like it's closing like a connection to the SCSI hardware?
Am I right?

[Void Main]

Well, as it says in the threads the scsi_device_cancel command was removed from recent kernels:
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions ... el-605626/

Apparently because it was unused:
http://lwn.net/Articles/241808/

I would assume that if it was unused when you used the driver before that removing it should have no effect at all. I really don't have a lot of time to dig into it deeper than that but I suspect the only people that could give you the answer you are really looking for is from the vendor of the hardware you are talking about. Did you say you reported this issue to them? Maybe you could ask them this question and see if you can get a response from them.

[Basher52]

yes I posted a question about this but as the other says, it may not even get a reply
we'll see