Upgrading Servers

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I did some research into how we can upgrade the web servers without being physically at the machines. This is what I came up with. - Callum^{Talk CS} 20:06 11/May/2007 (GMT+7)

Upgrading the Web Servers

I focused my research on the web servers, and upgrading to CentOS.

The first challenge is how to upgrade without a remote KVM. I understand that we have a remote serial console, so the first challenge is to get the machine to boot to serial console. This is possible via Grub.

You can also set a "boot once" option in Grub, so if the boot fails, it will fall back on another configuration. Hopefully, this means we can reboot the machine to serial console, if it fails, it'll reboot itself and we'll get back on via ssh.

Once we have that working, my idea to upgrade the box was from a hard drive based install. There is a /tmp partition of about 1Gb on the machine, which is essentially unused. The first step is to unmount it as temp, remount it somewhere else and then put the CentOS ISO on that partition.

CentOS can be installed from the CD1 ISO, or a better option is the CentOS ServerCD once it's released (unknown when that will be). CentOS also supports a local hard disk boot directly from ISO.

I found a how to on getting the machine to boot in this way. I can't find the link now but I could dig it out again.

Once the machine boots to serial console, and then the CentOS install runs, (if it's CD1 deselect all packages including base), the machine should bring up an ssh server, and from there the rest is easy... :)

I'm happy to answer any questions on this, although I don't guarantee I'll know the answers! Callum^{Talk CS} 20:06 11/May/2007 (GMT+7)

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