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Upgrading Red Hat 9 Using YUM

Well I finally decided I wasn't going to lose anymore time trying to install Mondo Rescue and doing successful backups before upgrading the firewall from RH9 to Fedora. Its getting too close to the RH9 expiry date. So this is what I did.

  1. First I located and downloaded YUM for RH9 to the network share on my Linux server. RPMFind.Net is a good place to go. I needed to fiddle around with chmod to set the permissions to 755 by ssh'ing into the server from my Linux desktop. From the firewall I checked the dependencies using rpm --install --test yum*, which told me I had a dependency for libxml2- python.
  2. So next I found this using RPMFind.Net and downloaded it. After the same permissions fiddling I checked its dependences using the line above with 'libx*' as the name like so rpm --install --test libx*, which told me that I now had a dependency on libxml2
  3. Predictably enough I went back to RPMFind.Net and downloaded libxml2, fiddled with its permission and then tested that using the exact same line above. This time it did not report any dependencies - success!
  4. Now I used rpm to install the libxml files rpm --install libx*. This completed without error. Now I retested YUM and this time got no dependency reports. So I went ahead and installed YUM using rpm --install yum*. Success! So I was ready to use YUM to upgrade RH9 to Fedora, but how?
  5. So I googled "yum red hat 9 fedora upgrade" (without the quotes) and found this webpage at: http://www.brandonhutchinson.com/Upgrading_Red_Hat_Linux_with_yum.html which told me what to do. As I'd already done step 1 the hard way I could go straight onto step 2, which went without event (almost as if "did it actually do anything"). Then it was time to do step 3!!! yum update I'm such a coward that I kicked it off and went out for the evening.
  6. Well that was OK. The real test was rebooting (the next morning - no good trying these things at half past midnight in a non-sober state, full of an excellent Wedding Anniversary dinner and dog tired! ;-) So next morning, does a reboot (lights on so I can see the boot list) and there it is! Fedora Core 1 with the latest kernel version. And BooHoo it don't work! :-( I could ping the ADSL router beyond it, but can't get out onto the internet. To cut a long story short, the problem was actually in the routing table. I'd been messing about with the network and left a wrong IP entry in /etc/sysconfig/network that screwed it all up. So in an hour we were back up and running - hooray!

Just in case the link ever breaks here are the instructions to upgrade a RH9 system to Fedora:

1. Download and install the Fedora version of yum:
rpm -Uvh http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/core/1/i386/os/Fedora/RPMS/yum-2.0.4-2.noarch.rpm

2. Download and install the fedora-release package.
rpm -Uvh http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/core/1/i386/os/Fedora/RPMS/fedora-release-1-3.i386.rpm

3. Upgrade to Fedora.
yum upgrade

They look a lot easier than my method, but this worked for me, especially as I fiddled with my yum.conf file to poin to UK-based mirror servers, as Red Hat is getting slower and slower.