Upgrade SuSE 10.0 to openSuSE 10.2 RC1

Preparing – Installing

I downloaded the DVD iso from openSuSE Downloads. Burned it with "cdrecord -v -eject dev=1,0,0 /tmp/openSUSE-*.iso". Made a backup of my /etc directory and rebooted the server. After changing the language I started the install. What happed next I did not expect. When selecting other media for the installation, as I wanted to integrate both the Guru and Packman repositories, I was confronted with the problem of the network card not being started at boot time. I restarted and instead of installing from DVD I selected in the menu that I wanted to install from FTP. After entering a random server I started the install process again. As I expected, the network card was enabled from the start. Now I only had to tell the text based installer (for some reason it had not started the Graphics bases system) that I had changed my mind and wanted to install from CD (in this case a DVD but who cares). After a few seconds the graphics installer was started and I could add the Guru repository for 10.2. The Packman repository did not work with Yast at the time of my installation, such that I had to allow the installer to deinstall some packages that the distribution does not have. After that everything worked but for one thing, the Grub bootloader installation came back with some weird errors. I clicked on ignore and continued. The server restarted and did not boot, as the installation had entered "/dev/hda1" into the "root (/dev/hda1,1)" section of the "/boot/grub/menu.lst" file. The correct entry should read "root (hd0,1)".

Cyrus database problems

The Cyrus IMAP server has always been a pain in the a$ to upgrade. My system was no exception. I had had to go trough this problem when upgrading from SuSE 9.3 to 10.0 before. There are 100 different ways of getting your Cyrus working again, but for me this has proven to be the best. Log in as root and enter the following commands:

rccyrus stop 
cd /var/lib/imap/
rm db/* 
rm db.backup
rm db.backup1/*
m db.backup2/*
rm deliver.db
rm tls_sessions.db
su cyrus
/usr/lib/cyrus/bin/ctl_mboxlist -d > /tmp/mailboxes.txt
mv mailboxes.db mailboxes.db.old
exit
rccyrus start

That should take care of any database problems.

Smart package manager

I have an aversion for GUI based package managers. Smart is my current favorite. Guru provides with up to date smart packages which I installed after the first boot. To make sure that all the old channels did not interfere with the new system I deleted them with  a quick "rm /var/lib/smart/* -rf".

The 27th of November marks the day I started upgrading my all-round-does-everything server from SuSE 10.0 to openSuSE 10.2 RC1. This is the log of what I went through.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Time limit is exhausted. Please reload CAPTCHA.