Greetings all.

I have been running a few servers, all Jakarta Tomcat on both RH9 and
Fedora Core 6 for a while. Same machines running vsftpd and Unreal
Tournament game servers.

In the process of phasing out the RH9/JRE 1.4.2 installs and
getting both live servers updated.

They will be running Tomcat 5.5.20 and JDK 1.5.0_10 on either
FC6 or FC8.

Is FC8 an improvement over FC6 for running servers ? Will I run into
any version issues with mysql if I have FC8 running on my development
PC and FC6 on the production server ?

My prod box is a P4 3.0 HT setup. Server boxes include 1 P4 2.4g HT
and 3 P3 Tualatin servers. (2 live, 2 backups) All maxed on memory.

Anybody been down this road yet ?

Thanks in advance.

Fedora 8 (they dropped Core from name as of version 7 so its not longer "FC 8" - just "F 8") is "bleeding edge". It likely does have some improvements over FC 6. However, FC 6 isn't that old whereas RH 9 is extremely old. If you're reinstalling I'd recommend going F 8 just because of the rapid lifecycle of Fedora - to prevent having to upgrade again soon.

FC6 is beyond EOL (end of life) and there will be no further official updates for it of any kind. Fedora's support life is now down to just over a year. They only have support for the two newest version. So when F9 is released (in June?) support for F7 will drop.

For servers you may want to consider Centos. Centos is RHEL(Red Hat Enterprise Linux) with the logos removed. It is binary compatible with RHEL. RHEL/Centos5.1 was based on FC6 so it has a very similar "feel". Centos is free to download and has a five year support life.

Install the new repository for Fedora 7, then do 'yum upgrade'. When finished do the same to upgrade from Fedora 7 to Fedora 8.

Upgrading this way from release to release has helped keeping my servers up to date. It can be done on a running production server, only reboot is required when upgrade has finished. Other people on this site also reported success with this kind of upgrading.

Your configuration files will remain intact. Only files and applications will be updated that existed on your original Fedora 6. Applications new to Fedora 7 or 8 have to be installed specifically.

Xen in Hardy

The official Fedora policy is to do a fresh install. Yum upgrades are generally frowned upon becuase when things fail (mid install) you are really stuck. The other problem is when things 1/2 fail. The system runs (eh) ok but the performance is not up to par. Many people do not realize how much of a performance hit they have taken until they have to do a fresh install. When this happens it is almost impossible to track down the source of the problem. Further, the conf files for a lot of apps change from version to version (OS) and a bad conf file can cause screwy results. More importantly all Fedora versions after FC6 use sdX for all drive types (as opposed to hdX for pata and sdX for sata). The yum upgrades often get confused as to which drives are which (going from hdX to sdX) particularly if the system has both pata and sata drives. Basically this means that the jump from FC6 is particularly sticky.

Fedora 9 will be released in 21 days, not in June (http://fedoraproject.org/). F8 has a lot of improvements over FC6, and F9 will have even more. If you want a system that will maintain version consistency long term though, use Centos as lazlow mentioned. The Fedoras aren't really "bleeding edge", they are just the latest stable releases of things and have a 6 mos renew cycle. What that means is that every 6 months the "latest stable" software is used. It is still stable from an application perspective, it just isn't stable from a version perspective (i.e. the version numbers change fast). Fedora makes a great desktop system and if you don't mind upgrading your servers often it does well at that also.

HTH

Forrest

I have done several upgrades with Fedora. Some of these started with Fedora 1, others with Fedora 4 or Fedora 6. In the end they are running Fedora 8 and it has be done by using 'yum upgrade'. I know of other people who did the same even on this site.

Around Fedora 4 some changes happened in the Fedora and Linux toolchain (the switch from XFree86 to Xorg, changes in device naming) and only minor changes were needed in files like /etc/fstab for custom mount points.

A clean install is of course always easier to if you have no data and services to care about.

But upgrading a production server is easier then re-installing everything, migrating user data and accounts and setting all configuration files again from scratch.

I noticed that most myths about upgrading problem go back to early problems with yum (when it was moved from Yellow Dog's Mac hardware implementation to Intel) and due to upgrade problem with Fedora 2 and Fedora 3.

These problems have been solved. I've seen it working properly.

Then again, there are people who re-install the entire system each time they run into a problem. Well, that's the freedom of choice, I guess.

Bye,
M