8.04 to 10.04 dist upgrade

[Hakan Koseoglu]

Hi Ric,
On 29 August 2010 23:59, Ric Moore <wayward4now at gmail.com> wrote:
> Good job, then! I certainly stand corrected. I fervently hope this
> becomes the norm. But, it will remain my personal preference to
> re-format, install clean and then restore backup data for anything I
> considered 'mission critical". That's just me from my personal
> experience. Ric
Some distributions do not offer upgrade paths, RedHat for example will
not advise to upgrade from RHEL4 to RHEL5 whereas minor releases (5.3
to 5.4 to 5.5) are actually just update repackages (similar to
Ubuntu's 10.04.1 release) and it's no more complicated than running
yum after a backup.

One of Debian/Ubuntu way's strength is supposed to be upgrading it all
the way to the latest release in small increments and I love it.

You are right to say a clean backup is less riskier, no real danger is
involved as long as there is a backup method. When I upgraded my web
server, I made a backup using Mondo and tested it by restoring to an
identical hardware. Once I knew there was a good backup, I went ahead
with the upgrade from 8.04 to 10.04 and everything worked. I only
trashed that backup a couple of days ago.

Installing from scratch may take more time and risky than its worth,
especially if your system is full of little customizations in scripts
and configuration. You will have to merge the changes by hand instead
of installer giving you the option of running a diff and merge them -
which it does in a very reasonable way. When done manually, it's all
too easy to miss a line or file sitting somewhere.

I understand that not everyone has a spare server to test these
things. At least checking if a backup is recoverable is a must.
Restoring it into a virtual machine running somewhere else is always a
possibility.

And finally, if a server is really mission critical and works fine
with 8.04, there is no reason to upgrade since 8.04 is still supported
for a long while (April 2013 for servers and April 2011 for desktops
and I do not count desktops as mission critical, whatever a home user
says - someone losing pron archive is not important in my books).
-- 
Hakan (m1fcj) - http://www.hititgunesi.org