Is it possible to upgrade the distro by just upgrading all of the rpms?

I can't physically access the server, so I need to do it remotely.

Shall I just go into the RPMS directory and type rpm -Uvh *.rpm ?

Any experiences or suggestions?

Thanks,
Justin

you can update by the packages.. most of the time its the only difference in the distro's, updated packages.
many people who use linux never update the whole distro, but just the packages they need and use to update.

-trickykid

Cool... I am curious though... i use up2date to keep the latest security patches and such on there. What core packages would I need to upgrade to make sure that up2date sees that it is redhat 7.2?

Justin

You don't want to do an upgrade, unless you have enough spare time to do a complete reinstall after all. Upgrading some rpm's with newer ones is normal, but when you want a new version you better tar your /home/<user> and the special config files you've made, than reinstall with a new distro.
Mind that you don't have to repartition, just a format will suffice.

Good luck, dJezzer

Yeah... I can't do that. It's a server that I haven't physically seen in 6 months or so. I'm not crazy about upgrading at all, but I'd run into a couple issues that made me feel like I might should try.

Justin

it's pretty easy just upgrading most of the rpms, seldom anythign to worry abuot, it can just look a bit scary when you have 50 or so rpm's updating no one single command line. be brave tho, as long as you don't do anythign daft.

daft
1 a : SILLY, FOOLISH b : MAD, INSANE
2 Scottish : frivolously gay


Frivolously gay. LOL.

I must ask... what is the best way of determining what rpms to gather? For instance... I grabbed the php-4.0.6 rpm. Tried to upgrade, and it asked for 8 different libraries. So, grabbed the libraries. Tried to upgrade all at once, and it said that I had about 20 programs that were all dependent on the old libraries... I don't even bother going through all of them because I know this chain could go on for quite a while Is there a simpler way to handle this?

Justin

not that i'm aware of with redhat. i herar about up2date, but i'm not really sure what it does. Mandrake uses the urpm system, which automatically deals with rpm dependencies, but when i upgraded my system by rpm, i did just do sections at a time and manually sort out deps myself, installing like i said, up to 50 rpms in one line.

As far as I'm aware of, up2date only grabs files that are official updates to the current distro (in the redhat 7.1 update directory). I could be wrong. Maybe I'll just go and install the redhat 7.2 release package and up2date and see what happens

::sigh:: here goes that chain of dependencies again!

Update: I installed redhat-release, the new up2date, and all of their dependencies. When I ran up2date again, it showed all the new redhat 7.2 packages to be upgraded! Woohoo. We'll see what happens when I update


Justin

UPDATE: I tried this on another rh7.1 machine. All you have to do is download and install redhat-release and then run up2date -uf.

Woohoo! It worked.

So for future reference, get the redhat-release package and the up2date package, along with all the corresponding dependencies (there's a few of em ). After you get all the packages from the RPMS directory, it'd be a good idea to go to the corresponding updates directory and download the files that have been updated.

Then run up2date -uf (or rhn_register if you haven't done that yet). And it'll update everything.

Make sure you have pleeenty of space in you /var partition. I actually went into the up2date configuration file and had it store all the temporary rpms in my home directory instead.

Also, my / partition nearly filled up, I haven't figured out yet as to why.

No issues yet, I'll post here if I encounter any.

Justin

One question.

df -HT now reports an additional line:

none tmpfs 130M 0 130M 0% /dev/shm

What is this?

Justin