[olug] upgrading to Fedora 21 - smoothest one in a while

[Lou Duchez]

So it's Fedora upgrade time again; I've upgraded a half dozen servers 
without any hitches.  The process I've been following:

1) "yum update" to make sure you're up to date on your Fedora 20.

2) "package-cleanup --leaves" and "package-cleanup --orphans" to find 
any packages that yum doesn't quite know what to do with.  Then run "yum 
remove ________" to get rid of all those packages.

3) "yum clean all"

4) "yum --releasever=21 distro-sync"*

5) This is a new wrinkle: Fedora 21 now comes in three basic products, 
"workstation", "cloud", and "server".  So you are now to run one of the 
four following commands to pick which of the three products you want:

     yum install system-release-workstation
     yum install system-release-cloud
     yum install system-release-server
     yum install system-release-nonproduct

     I went with "nonproduct".

6) Figure out which device you boot from, by running this command:

     df | grep "/boot$" | cut -f 1 -d " "

     It will probably return something like "/dev/sda1", which is 
actually a partition and not a device.  But in this case, the device is 
"/dev/sda".

7) Run "grub2-install BOOTDEVICE" (which would be the device from the 
previous step)

8) Reboot!  If your experience is anything like mine, your server will 
come right up without any problems.


*: One thing I like to do is, after yum has downloaded all the version 
21 files it needs and has started installing them, I hit Ctrl-Z and then 
run "bg" to make yum run in the background.  That way, even if my SSH 
session gets disconnected, there's still a pretty good chance that yum 
can and will run to completion, rather than screeching to a halt halfway 
through.