Argo is now upgraded to CentOS 5.0. There was the usual amount of pain for a server that runs all possible services, but for the most part the upgrade went very well.

So far the only remaining problem is jabberd. I don't have new packages available and the old ones don't start. I guess this is a good time to upgrade to ejabberd.

Feel free to comment if you have problems with the server; or catch me on AIM.

Since yum isn't capable of downgrading the correct package, I decided to try smart.

And after a couple hours (literally) of computing transactions, it worked.

Now, there's definitely some cleanup to do, but it's pretty good. Unfortunately smart isn't available for RHEL 5 yet (I've emailed rpmforge to request it), but things are looking pretty good.

The biggest problem is that yum doesn't work. After quickly fixing the python-elementtree package, yum now says:
# yum clean all
Loading "installonlyn" plugin

Could not find any working storages.

Fortunately, here's how to fix it.

For me it was:
# rpm -Uvh sqlite-3.3.6-2.i386.rpm python-sqlite-1.1.7-1.2.1.i386.rpm

And here's the config I used for smart:
smart channel --add "Silfreed.net" type=rpm-md priority=-3 baseurl=http://www.silfreed.net/download/repo/rhel/5/i386/silfreednet -y
smart channel --add "Dries" type=rpm-md priority=-5 baseurl=http://ftp.belnet.be/packages/dries.ulyssis.org/redhat/el5/en/i386/dries/RPMS -y
smart channel --add "Dag" type=rpm-md priority=-5 baseurl=http://apt.sw.be/redhat/el5/en/i386/dag/ -y
smart channel --add "EPEL" type=rpm-md priority=-2 baseurl=http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/epel/5/i386 -y
smart channel --add "CentOS Base" type=rpm-md baseurl=http://mirror.centos.org/centos/5/os/i386/ -y
smart channel --add "CentOS Updates" type=rpm-md baseurl=http://mirror.centos.org/centos/5/updates/i386/ -y
smart channel --add "CentOS Addons" type=rpm-md baseurl=http://mirror.centos.org/centos/5/addons/i386/ -y
smart channel --add "CentOS Extras" type=rpm-md baseurl=http://mirror.centos.org/centos/5/extras/i386/ -y

Figured I'd try upgrading again; this time from CentOS 4.5 to 5. When 4.5 came out I quickly tried just pushing the new centos-release and centos-release-notes packages onto the server and do a 'yum upgrade', but it failed trying to meet dependencies (kernel and kudzu, I believe).

So now it's coming time to do some maintenance to Argo and I'd like to upgrade to CentOS 5 finally. I did some research, and it doesn't sound any easier than before.

First, some packages in CentOS 4.5 are newer than what's available in 5.0. This means even anaconda will have problems (I've experienced this before upgrading from an updated FC6 to F7). That thread basically says it's probably easier to wait for 5.1 to come out, then update before 4.6 comes out.

Then there's the problem of yum not working after and upgrade.

And of course there's the guy who had various breakage doing the update manually.

So I'll probably try to do the upgrade manually on my firewall first just to see how it goes. I guess the worst-case scenario is that I have to install CentOS 5 onto some new drives for Argo, then copy the data over from the existing drives. Not the most ideal upgrade path, but it's an upgrade path.

For awhile now my file server has been running Fedora Core 6. I never have a good time to upgrade it to Fedora 7 because I'm always using it.

In the beginning I had envisioned running multiple VMs on it for compiling packages; it's an x86_64 box, so I would gain an arch (currently only i386) and would be to compile both the Intel architectures on one box. I'd free up space on my laptop since I wouldn't have 4 VMs sitting on it (that rarely work with VMWare anyway).

The problem has been that he Xen kernels have locked up my file server for awhile. I'm not sure when it started, but things would just hang when udev was starting.

The recent kernel-xen-2.6.20-1.3001 package seems to have fixed that though. So I setup a bunch of VMs one day and got them updated.

Well, all but a FC6 VM. For some reason I constantly have problems running that as a domU.

Unfortunately I then realized that my ivtv drivers weren't loading because there weren't any packages available. My file server also serves as my MythTV backend, so there was a day there were I missed some recordings. Axel's moving this week, so kernel packages have been stalled while he gets things situated. So, I'm back to a regular 2.6.22 kernel.

One thing I did notice is that the tickless support in 2.6.22 definitely helps on this server - it keeps things much cooler than the 2.6.20 kernel does.

Oh, and the VMs I'm running (or want to run) include:
Fedora Core 6 x86_64: not working
Fedora 7 x86_64: working
CentOS3.9 x86_64: wouldn't install
CentOS4.5 x86_64: working
CentOS5.0 x86_64: working

So I still need to get FC6 and CentOS3 installed, but things are going pretty well, I think. After the ivtv drivers are available I should be back to trying to get things going.