[YLUG] Upgrading best-practice

[john halewood]

On 7 June 2010 22:28, Steve Almond <steve at silkandslug.com> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I'm almost embarrassed to mention it, as it sounds horribly un-techie,
> but my current Linux-based problem is regards upgrading. More
> specifically, I want to upgrade a headless server from Ubuntu 10.4 on
> two partitions (/ and /home) to Debian (or Ubuntu 10.10 or whatever) on
> at least two partitions. I've looked at it a couple of times, but my
> research only gets so far before it bogs down in partitioning scheme
> dogma, upgrading verses installing, worries about upgrading config files
> while keeping settings, etc.

I had to do something similar when upgrading a machine from 8.04 to
10LTS and ran out of disk space on the original partition. Fortunately
there was more disk space available. If you have enough disk space,
just upgrade - the upgrade will ask you if you want to keep your
settings for existing apps and give you the opportunity to replace or
merge them - this should be fairly straightforward but will require
manual intervention during the upgrade process. /home shouldn't be
touched at all.
In my case there wasn't enough space on / or /var, so I had to telinit
1, cp -a /var and /usr to new partitions, change /etc/fstab to reflect
that and then upgrade. Went alright after that - just don't lose the
ssh connection.
YMMV. Good luck.


cheers
john