Fedora 9 Upgrade Snaffus!

Keywords: inittab, upstart, daemontools, djbdns, qmail, X.org, supervise, svscanboot

Howdy race fans! If you've noticed a little downtime here in the last 24 hours, it's because a "routine" upgrade to Fedora Core 9 went a little haywire. Apparently FC9 changes a bunch of key things and we didn't know that ahead of time. So, I thought I'd briefly share lessons learned.

installed upgrade, reboot hangs
We found that the install/upgrade DVD didn't install anything, but screwed up the boot loader. Bob had to go into the rescue mode and reinstall a functioning boot loader and then run yum update. Instead of using the DVD, I recommend using preupgrade as it will likely work better. FC9 makes a lot of changes to functionality, so it's good to get some automated conversion done.

inittab out, upstart in
If you were relying on anything starting from /etc/inittab previously, it's now obsoleted. Instead, you need to put a script into /etc/events.d/ and configure it properly. For daemontools, this is a bit of a problem, but one easily solved. Here's what my /etc/events.d/svscanboot script looks like:

# svscan - daemontools
#
# This service starts daemontools from the point the system is
# started until it is shut down again.

start on runlevel-1
start on runlevel-2
start on runlevel-3
start on runlevel-4
start on runlevel-5
start on runlevel-6

stop on shutdown

exec /command/svscanboot
respawn

BTW, you'll use the initctl command to start, stop, or status the script. So, you can add the above script to /etc/events.d/svscanboot and then do initctl start svscanboot and it should launch your proc(s).

X doesn't start
This error can occur for a number of reasons, such as your having an ATI card for which there are possibly no drivers. The biggest challenge, however, could be the outdated config file. Apparently the latest X.org install auto-configures a lot more stuff, so you don't need much in /etc/X11/xorg.conf. If you're not getting a GUI, try moving your xorg.conf file to xorg.conf.bak (or backup or old or whatever) and then rebooting. You'll likely then need to do a bunch of display reconfiguration changes, but at least you should be in a graphical mode.

Bottom line: there's a ton of info on Google if you put in good search terms - it just takes some good searching. Good luck!