As some of you may have noticed, I took an outage yesterday to upgrade the OS on the main server from Fedora Core 4 to Core 6. I’ve been planning this one for a while and decided to go a different route with the upgrade. In the past I’ve bought new hardware and installed on it, copying the data over and for the most part running in parallel. I decided not to do that this time because a. I’m cheap, and b. the hardware in place handles the load just fine.

Because of that I needed to come up with a different plan, and thankfully I have 1.5 terabytes of NAS sitting here on a gig-e network. So I used rsync to back up the entire filesystem, verified that it was there and looking good, and then did a fresh install. It was a little scary, but worked out well. In fact, I think it went faster than the previous attempts.

I had the usual problem, such as getting SELinux tuned correctly, but for the most part it went off without any major issues.

Some words of advice, plan carefully. Make a list of what you’ve got to do to complete the migration and in what order. That list will be missing steps but they’ll be minor. Update the list when you find missing steps so that you’ll be better prepared next time.