[GLLUG] Problems with CentOS 4 to 5 upgrade

[Chris Bell]

On Friday, 24 November 2017 17:40:16 GMT Jan Henkins via GLLUG wrote:
> Hi,
> 

> >In spite of that I would suggest that an occasional clean reinstall is
> >not a bad
> >idea. That way you get rid of the crud that is installed but is no
> >longer needed.
> >A good update system cannot always remove crud.
> 
> Absolutely correct. In an ideal world I try to do this either every other
> distro in the case of Debian, or go for completely new installations for
> each new Ubuntu LTS release. Most of the time this doesn't work (normally
> too many 3rd party repositories, my own fault), so I always have backups
> handy to help me un-fubar the situation. On my servers things are a lot
> more predictable, since I rather go for small specialist VMs that does as
> few jobs as possible. Virtualisation is awesome!

I use Debian which receives a major update about every two years, and I have 
decided that the best for me is to format three partitions + swap, with /  
installed to one of the first two normally same smaller size partitions, the 
other labelled /future, and the third as /srv to be accessible from both the 
current / and /future. When I eventually install to /future the previous / is 
labelled /old. I have to edit /old/etc/fstab because both the swap and /future 
partitions will be re-formatted with new ID's.
I use symlinks to redirect locations within /home/user to /srv/ which may be 
on a separate RAID.
I can then boot either the latest or the older installation and retain all 
important data.
-- 
Chris Bell
Website http://chrisbell.org.uk