Re: rpm3 to rpm4 upgrade, crashed rpm DB

["Ambar Roy" <ambarroy@xxxxxxxxx>]

> Ambar what exactly were the problems you faced in doing a rpm upgrade ??
> I have been running 5 production server with virtually no downtime from
> myside. A upgrade is a upgrade doesnt matter whether you are upgrading a
> security fix or glibc. Mind you I have actually done a glibc upgrade on
> a live production server and it hasnt complained about it till date -
> about 5 months now :). If glibc works fine I am not sure what would
> cause a problem.
i don't remember the exact packages, but all i remember was that the upgrade
was for some feature that was not critical, and my server was down for some
time.. so since then i hav never tried this on a running server. Another
problem that i had was when i upgraded my rh 6.0 install to rh6.1 using the
rh 6.1 install's upgrade feature.. That upgrade ate up way too much disk
space!  i hav since then resorted to reinstalling my linux workstation
whenever i wan't a major feature upgrade.
    In past i hav tried to do many major upgrades with various levels of
success. All of those were using tgz files. My experience with 2 of them
were quite intresting. I remember when kernel 2.0 had come out, i spent 14
days to download the tarbal, and all the patches. Then i cud install the new
kernel w/o much problems. Another surgery that i had done to that system was
adding support for elf binaries. That was something totally different. I had
to download tons of things like ld, libc etc, and finally i had a system
that cud run elf binaries, but for which i had almost downloaded a whole new
distro. After that i always followed this rule of not upgrading till my ill
fated rh 6.0 to rh 6.1 upgrade. And now i hav decided that i will never do
any such surgery on a production rh server. Also i maintain a config backup
server for most of my critical server, so for any such thing i always first
test out any updates, etc on these servers (running inside vmware!) before i
do the upgrade on the actual servers..

Bye,
    /\ |\/| |3 /\ r