Details problems related to upgrading a server to fedora 18.
I recently took the opportunity to upgrade my server from fedora 16 to fedora 18.
My server is used to host websites, handle mail and interface to a number of house monitoring systems.
Looking at the documentation, the upgrade from fedora 16 to Fedora 18 is not straightforward as the layout of Fedora 18 is substantially different to Fedora 16. So I decided that a fresh install of Fedora 18 would be the best way forward.
So:
Step 1 – backup the existing system. I repeat backup the existing system. I have my server configured to use the excellent Bacula backup software which backs up regularly to an external USB hard drive.
Step 2 – install Fedora 18 from an installation DVD. I use the KDE spin as I prefer the KDE interface to the bloated Gnome interface.
Now we have a running Fedora 18 system, we need to setup all the systems to provide the necessary services that were on the old server.
Step 3 – install the Bacula software and then do a restore to a temporary area so that all the files are readily accessible. Restoring a lot of the services is simply a case of copying the data files from the backup to the new system. For example restoring MySQL databases is simply a case of stopping MySQL, copying the database files and restarting MySQL.
Problems
I encountered three main problems when trying to get the systems running under Fedora 18.
- The change to Perl 5.16
- The change from Apache 2.2 to Apache 2.4
- owfs from the silfreed.net repository gives spurious readings.
Apache
The change from 2.2 to 2.4 means some significant changes to the configuration file. As I host a number of web sites which have virtualhost declarations in the apache config file, this required a painstaking editing of the config files to get the server to start.
owfs
owfs are packages that provide access to one wire devices by making them appear as files in the filesystem. There currently don’t appear to be any RPM owfs packages for Fedora 18 although the silfreed.net repository does have RPMs for Fedora 17. Loading these, however, results in values for temperature and pressure being wildly inaccurate (temp was 5.5551E+07!)
I reverted to loading the same RPMs that I had installed on Fedora 16 and everything worked correctly.
Perl 5.16
The main problem with the change to Perl 5.16 was that the Logitech media server (LMS) would no longer start.The error was Can’t locate Slim/bootstrap.pm in @INC . I spent some time searching the Internet for this and it seemed that a lot of people were having this problem but no-one had a solution.
This was annoying as I use LMS to serve out audio to my squeezeboxes as well as serving video and pictures to my PS3.
Firstly I removed the RPM of the LMS that I installed from the squeezebox repository and removed the repository from yum.
Next I made sure that any firewalls were switched off – by default Fedora 18 has firewalld running a restrictive firewall which will cause problems. As the server is behind a separate firewall, this didn’t cause a problem.
Next I installed the rpmfusion repos as the version of LMS to be installed depends on these repos to provide the codecs.
yum -y install http://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-18.noarch.rpm yum -y install http://download1.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-18.noarch.rpm
Next I went to the communitysqueeze website www.communitysqueeeze.org and downloaded the latest RPM for my architecture (x86_64). This installs the community squeeze repo into yum.
Now it is simply a case of installed the LMS using yum.
yum -y install logitechmediaserver
This installs LMS from the community squeeze site which works under Perl 5.16.