Rough upgrade to FC4

[lgu at pobox.com (Larry Underhill)]

On Sun, 2006-01-22 at 22:13 -0500, Bill Mills-Curran wrote:
> I feel lucky that I didn't brick my system.  What did I do wrong?
> This must be a common occurance.  I have another system that I need to
> upgrade, but I don't want it to go like this.  What's a better way?

Hey there Bill. Sorry to hear about your upgrade woes. On my fedora
boxen, I avoid up2date. (although I have had great experience with it on
the RHEL distro with Red Hat Network) 

I'm a big fan of yum. I think Seth Vidal has done a great job with it
and I have used it to upgrade several systems. I have taken one box
(standard LAMP stuff) from FC1 => FC4 with no problems. 

After a backup of /var and /home, my general procedure is to:

a) 'yum update' my box to ensure latest/greatest from the Fedora Base
and Fedora Updates repositories. 

b) manually install fedora-release RPM.

c) manually install yum rpm for the release (in your case FC4) that you
are upgrade to.

d) double check that I have GPG check enabled in my yum config files and
I also have the correct keys on my ring.

e) do a sanity check that I have good network connectivity to the remote
repository that I am going to pull my RPMs from (personally, I've
settled on mirrors.kernel.org). 

f) yum upgrade

g) review the list of packages it marks for upgrade and the associated
dependency checking for sanity.

h) cross fingers. hit 'Y'. go get coffee.

Best of luck, 

--Larry