upgrade bits & pieces

[Steve Blinkhorn <steve%prd.co.uk@localhost>]

Some residual questions arising from my need to upgrade colo servers
remotely, without any real possibility of physical access (for medical
reasons).

1. I just upgraded a machine in the next room from 2.0.2 to 4.0.1.
First I copied all the install sets over, then I took a copy of the
contents of pam.d from a 4.0 machine, then I unpacked a 4.0.1 kernel.
I argued a lot with myself as to whether I should unpack base.tgz
first or reboot, and decided to unpack base.tgz.   Mistake, I think -
reboot wouldn't work because of a system call failure.   If I had
rebooted first, would a later unpacking of base.tgz have worked?

2. There are mutterings in the installation guide (round about page
35) about upgrading involving replacing boot blocks.  Really?
Necessrily?   If so, why is this machine working when all I have done
in essence is to replace the kernel and the base software?

3. Postinstall tells me that I have to set up some uids and gids
manually. a) why cannot this be dome programmatically? b) does it
matter what the numeric uids and gids are?   If it matters, or if
there are preferred values, why no textual hint?

4. A bunch of stuff has to be manually "migrated" from
/usr/X11R6/lib/X11 to /etc/X11.   Does "migrate" here mean move, copy,
something else?   And what's the problem with a programmatic
"migration"?

I have to do the remote upgrades soon, and would like to have a clear
view of the remaining issues - they run very dependably in production
mode, and upgrades are the only point when I have issues.   It would
be good if the installation notes were clearer as to just how simple
the process is.

--
Steve Blinkhorn <steve%prd.co.uk@localhost>