On Thu, 23 Dec 2004 16:37:27 +0800
"Cameron G" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> I'm just wondering, what's the best practice for upgrading a default
> installation 3.0 installation to the latest and greatest? I'd really 
> rather avoid rolling my own kernels

There are symbolic links in / for the kernel and initrd images, vmlinuz points 
to your currently installed kernel in /boot and initrd.img points to the 
matching matching initrd.img. These are what your lilo.conf entry should point 
to.

On a system where you have never upgraded the kenrel you should create symbolic 
links named vmlinuz.old and initrd.img.old that point to these same files, 
create an entry in your lilo.conf that points to these newly create .old links, 
then test it and make sure it boots correctly when selecting it from the boot 
menu.

With that done when you install a new kernel the symbolic links should get 
updated automatically so the links without the .old extension point to the 
newly installed kernel and the links with the .old extension point to the old 
kernel. Lilo should automatically be run during the installation as well, but 
especially running remotely the safe thing is to run it again yourself just to 
be sure. 

In this way you never (or at least rarely) have to modify lilo.conf and 
theoretically you should always have a working kernel in reserve that you can 
still boot the system with.

There may occasionally be minor updates to the kernel that are not expected to 
affect module compatibility where the kernel upgrade will replace your current 
kernel and leave the link to the old kernel unchanged.

I don't have any experience managing things remotely, but being the paranoid 
type, I would be sorely tempted to keep a third entry in lilo.conf that I 
manage myself and make sure always points to a known bootable kernel and initrd 
image.

If I am doing a major upgrade the things I like to install before I install the 
new kernel are initrd-tools, initscripts, sysvinit, module-init-tools, and 
mount.

Later, Seeker


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