Is a direct upgrade possible in this scenario while retaining all previous configurations and images?

[salted_cashews]

We’re currently running revision 689680 here, svn 6059, and bzImage 4.9.1. We’re wondering if we had to completely reinstall fog and recapture everything from scratch or if we could perform a simple upgrade directly from the FOG server itself? I ask only because in the past it was understood a complete rebuilding of the server was necessary to upgrade.

Lastly, does the integrity of images in this process depend on how the images were stored in regards to the storage type? NAS/virtual storage etc. We have our server configured with a regular HDD and a RAID 5 configuration.

Thanks guys.

[Wayne Workman]

@salted_cashews said in Is a direct upgrade possible in this scenario while retaining all previous configurations and images?:

in the past it was understood a complete rebuilding of the server was necessary to upgrade.

That’s no longer true (and I’m not sure it was ever true). A fog server on any version can be updated to the latest version.

does the integrity of images in this process depend on how the images were stored in regards to the storage type?

No.

Below is a link on how to get the latest FOG version:
https://wiki.fogproject.org/wiki/index.php?title=Getting_FOG

Below is a link to article explaining how to migrating a FOG Server from an old one to a new one if you are interested. While a FOG Server of any version can be upgraded to the latest version - there are times in the past where this has failed - and there are times when your old server (for whatever reason) is not operable/broken and an upgrade can’t be done. This is when you’d do a migration.
https://wiki.fogproject.org/wiki/index.php?title=Migrate_FOG

[salted_cashews]

@wayne-workman Thank you Wayne, the resources you provided were quite extensive.

[salted_cashews]

So I had tried the update process listed here: https://wiki.fogproject.org/wiki/index.php?title=Getting_FOG#Getting_FOG

I decided not to use a dev version so I skipped to https://wiki.fogproject.org/wiki/index.php?title=Getting_FOG#Running_the_installer instead.

The server itself came back fine, but once we edited the dhcpd.conf file through Vi it broke DHCP. It said there was a configuration file error. It gave us an “exited” code and a “status=1/failed” error message.

We reverted snapshot and we’re fine now, but we’re curious as to why this happened. Any ideas?

Thanks.

[Sebastian Roth]

@salted_cashews said in Is a direct upgrade possible in this scenario while retaining all previous configurations and images?:

We reverted snapshot and we’re fine now, but we’re curious as to why this happened. Any ideas?

Without knowing what exactly you changed in the dhcpd.conf there is no way we can tell you what went wrong. My guess is you had some kind of typo or syntax error in the config…

[Wayne Workman]

@sebastian-roth There are problems with the /opt/fog/.fogsettings file from pre-1.2 to 1.3+ if i remember.

@salted_cashews I think if you moved your old fogsettings file so a new one can be made, it should build the config fine. You need to use the /opt/fog/.fogsettings file to set the DHCP config you want - because the installer uses that file to build the DHCP config everytime it runs (if bldhcp is enabled).

[salted_cashews]

@wayne-workman We ended up consulting our in-house Linux master, the issues we were having went away once we got rid of a bunch of our old kernels, our boot drive was 100% full. Then we ended up re-installing and migrating the config over again and it worked fine. To be honest, I’m not 100% sure how our guy knew that was causing a problem.

Thanks for the insight and assistance guys.

[Wayne Workman]

@salted_cashews said in Is a direct upgrade possible in this scenario while retaining all previous configurations and images?:

To be honest, I’m not 100% sure how our guy knew that was causing a problem.

People with even some Linux experience normally check free space as a first-step in troubleshooting. Glad you got it figured out.