Okay, I’ve never done an upgrade install before, just clean ones, but this time… I’ve got a lot of stuff on this server, both in /home and other places (like /srv and /etc) that I really don’t want to have to figure out how to restore on a new install.
So. Is it possible, or even sane, to attempt to upgrade a fully patched 64 bit 10.3 system to 11.2?
Backup those important directories!
Worth a try if you have a backup. But unlikely to work. And even if it works, I suspect you will have so much crud in there it will not behave well.
Sigh. That’s sort of what I figured. I hope from what I’ve seen of 11.1 to 11.2 that they’ve finally figured out how to do an upgrade in place that works.
You know, this is normally when I build a new box to do the install on. Wasn’t really part of the plan this year.
You know that Novell do Enterprise versions: SLED and SLES? An option.
If you use the YaST upgrade try it out on a copy of your current system. Disk space is cheap these days. Installing clean into another partition, does let you import mount points and some basic settings though.
Frankly I think you’ll save time, if you just make a partition for a clean install into, try 11.2 on the hardware (there’s no guarantee you can boot it even and may need to go to the stable 11.1 in interim). I use rcs(1), whenever I do any significant changes to config files, which makes it very simple, with a mounted copy of old install, to re-apply updates, using sdiff(1) to merge in my changes with the distro’s.
Everything else you can, should be kept seperate from system partitions, like the /home & /srv you have, simplifying upgrade. Seems like the only real issue is not keeping track of what’s been installed, and losing touch with it.
May be you could have a play with attempting to duplicate the services as a test on another box?