i need to update a server running redhat 9 to fedora. sounds simple enough, now heres the problem. its a dedicated server which i rent and dont have physical access to. from what ive read i assume i can use yum to get the job done but can i go straight from redhat 9 to the latest fedora release or would i have to go in small increments, updating first to fedora 1 then 2, 3, and finally 4? also would this route leave most of the config files in tact? also i have plesk 6 for redhat running on the box, would upgrading in this way brake plesk?

You will most likely need physical root access to do such a thing. Yum can do it, but it will involve 2 restarts and lots of downloading...

i do have root on the box, and since its a server somewhere else that is being used for absolutely nothing at the moment i have no problem its not a problem if its tied up downloading for a while. after getting installing yum and the appropriate fedora-release rpms, can i pretty much just yum upgrade? or will other steps be needed? ive found a few tutorials for going from redhat 9 to fedora core 1 but nothing on jumping right to either 3 or 4. any suggestions?

Try here.. http://www.brandonhutchinson.com/Upg..._with_yum.html

thats actually the first tutorial i found, thats mainly what i used. i ended up going up to fedora core 1 first, then jumping right up to 3. all seems to be working fine. lots of dependency issues that kept killing the upgrade. i will never again complaining about the package system on my slackware box now that ive been exposed to rpms. a little advice to anyone else trying this: when upgrading with yum, --exclude is your friend.

You shouldn't really of gotten lots of dependancy issues. The only thing that killed the update on me was that it couldn't find packages for Xine. Everything else was found. I don't know what package system is on slackware, but rpm's are very easy to install. The only problem is getting to know the rpm command properly.

slackwares packages come in tgz files, no dependancy checking, it leaves it all up to the user which comes it handy if lets say you're upgrading one package, you wont get the package manager whining about some other package depending on it even though after the upgrade that package will still work fine, very simple and leave alot more up to the user so you have a better understanding of whats installed and what everything does. as for the server upgrade the first run crapped out complaining about missing dependancyies for pine, and since im a strictly pico user that is important, then upgrading yum wouldnt work with the current libs i had installed, after upgrading them it killed rpm, and the final upgrade have alot of problems with udev, plus alot of the libs plesk was looking for. looking back now i should have payed more attention to that part since my first guess was right and the upgrade killed plesk. something about it not being setup to work with the current version of mod_perl.i reverted to alot of older releases of the plesk requitements and still no luck so im stumped there, went back to all the updated packagesso i now run fedora core 3 smoothly just no plesk. im considering wiping everything now and installing fedora throguh the second partition method just because im sure there's alot of files still laying around from the original setup that are not used and i hate having a messy install.