Re: Upgrading a 2.2 kernel (3.0r2) to 2.6
On Thu, 23 Dec 2004 16:37:27 +0800
"Cameron G" <ritontor@icenet.com.au> wrote:
> I'm just wondering, what's the best practice for upgrading a default
> installation 3.0 installation to the latest and greatest? I'd really
> rather avoid rolling my own kernels
There are symbolic links in / for the kernel and initrd images, vmlinuz points to your currently installed kernel in /boot and initrd.img points to the matching matching initrd.img. These are what your lilo.conf entry should point to.
On a system where you have never upgraded the kenrel you should create symbolic links named vmlinuz.old and initrd.img.old that point to these same files, create an entry in your lilo.conf that points to these newly create .old links, then test it and make sure it boots correctly when selecting it from the boot menu.
With that done when you install a new kernel the symbolic links should get updated automatically so the links without the .old extension point to the newly installed kernel and the links with the .old extension point to the old kernel. Lilo should automatically be run during the installation as well, but especially running remotely the safe thing is to run it again yourself just to be sure.
In this way you never (or at least rarely) have to modify lilo.conf and theoretically you should always have a working kernel in reserve that you can still boot the system with.
There may occasionally be minor updates to the kernel that are not expected to affect module compatibility where the kernel upgrade will replace your current kernel and leave the link to the old kernel unchanged.
I don't have any experience managing things remotely, but being the paranoid type, I would be sorely tempted to keep a third entry in lilo.conf that I manage myself and make sure always points to a known bootable kernel and initrd image.
If I am doing a major upgrade the things I like to install before I install the new kernel are initrd-tools, initscripts, sysvinit, module-init-tools, and mount.
Later, Seeker
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