Fedora Core 12 DVD upgrade notes

On one of my systems, the attempt to upgrade the system hot using yum did not work. There were a bunch of dependency issues involving essentially every PHP package and I could not see a way to do what I usually do (erase some package I never use), so I gave up and resorted to doing the upgrade from DVD install media.

One trick before starting this. Since I had flipped the /etc/fedora-release file to 12, I needed to flip it back to 11 to allow the DVD upgrade gizmo do the right thing.

This is pretty straightforward, reboot from DVD, choose install or upgrade existing system, let it update grub, select my fedora 11 system and let it go. After a little over 3 hours it was ready to reboot. Note that it took forever doing whatever it does when it displays "finishing update process" with an active progress bar. Apparently this is a known issue, and definitely the best things is to wait it out, even if it takes hours (and some people say it does). When it is ready to reboot, remove the DVD and continue to the rest of the game.

The system did NOT come up cleanly. Among other things (this is our primary DNS server), named would not start, complaining that libdns.so.53 was missing. This package should be part of the bind-libs package, so something failed to get updated. What I do (since this machine also hosts our fedora mirror), is to go into /etc/yum.repos.d and change the fedora.repo file to use a file:/// URL instead of a http:// URL (to itself). Then I did: 

yum update bind\*
After this, named will start, which is progress. Several other services were not starting (dirsrv, dhcpd, rpc.nfsd, iptables). I am running single user sorting this out, and figure, what the heck: 
yum erase php-mhash
yum update
The package php-mhash was in some funky dependency with php-common from f11 (this may have been the root of my original problems, who knows), but after ditching this, it is off and running updating 1001 packages. We will let that finish and try starting the system up multi-user again.

I began this whole business (inserted the DVD) at 3:30 in the afternoon. Now it is 7:30 PM and we are running FC12 single user and updating packages. We are running the 2.6.31.5-127.fc12 kernel from the install DVD (this is an x86_64 system).

Around 10:45 and I am ready to go home. The login graphics (gdm) is completely screwed up for some reason. I dropped to run level 3, but ran around in circles because someone had the network service off for that run level. The whole collection of new packages seems to be working fine, but time will tell.

Things to do: Be sure this system can run in run level 3 in case the gdm business is a pain to sort out (this machine doesn't need a graphical login, it is a server, so heck with it). Get rid of firestarter and figure out how to do a iptables service for that.

LDAP screwup

As has happened more than once in the pass, this upgrade screwed up files in /etc/pam.d. The symptoms were that some (but not all) users were unable to authenticate (either to login or access their email). The affected users have user ID's less than 500. For more information, see my LDAP notes.
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Adventures in Computing / [email protected]