[Cialug] Upgrade questions

[Barry Von Ahsen]

Stuart Thiessen wrote:
> My main question is this ... how do I really do upgrades of the 
> operating system without it affecting my data and configuration files 
> for different services?

some handle changed config files differently.  debian will notice your 
config changed, and ask if you want to keep yours, install the 
maintainer's version, or diff them.  mandrake/redhat will keep yours, 
and install the new as package.conf.rpmnew (or similar)

> On my particular system, I have /, /boot, /opt, /usr, /home, /var all on 
> different partitions. I am assuming if I upgraded to a newer version of 
> SuSE or decided to go with a different distribution, that I could just 
> update all the other partitions but leave /home untouched, right?  What 
> about httpd configurations or other server configs? I know I should back 
> them up before upgrading, but then just restore them on top of the 
> upgrade or is there a better system for managing these kinds of 
> situations so that you don't have to go server by server and restore/fix 
> everything?

I have done this.  I have even switched distros with the same home and 
had reasonable success. (I was running debian, switched to mandrake, 
then back to debian, all with the same /home.  the only issue I had was 
that kde was newer in mandrake, so debian->mandrake went fine (an 
upgrade), but mandrake->debian didn't go so well - I just had to nuke my 
~/.kde dir, and all was well)

all in all, make a backup of /home, most of /etc, and upgrade, and if 
anything bombs, you've got backups for a clean install :)

-barry