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#1 2020-01-20 17:58:21

Xiong Chiamiov
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From: central coast, california
Registered: 2008-06-18
Posts: 142
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Fun or foolish: upgrading a system from 2013

This weekend I pulled out my fileserver and booted it up.  It's been longer since I used it than I thought - according to /var/log/boot, August 2013.  Based on the logs and my recollection, it had been about a year since I had been using it at that point, and doing that upgrade was a bit of a pain.  It looks like I got partway through the systemd migration?  It's installed, but not running, and the network configuration isn't moved over (and thus I have no network, which makes everything more complicated).

I was about to dive in to upgrading, but I'm realizing that maybe at this point it's not worth it.  Most of the information about the pre-network migration is long gone, and after getting that working I'd be making an incredibly large jump up to the modern day.  The specific configurations I had on the disk I mostly don't care about.  The main thing is that I had two mdadm arrays that were then LVMed together, with a bunch of data on them, and I'd rather not lose that and I'm nervous about having to rebuild those.  (I also appear to have bought another set of drives and installed them, but never set them up?  Too bad, they'd be much cheaper now.)

Thoughts?  It's been probably a decade now since I've installed Arch and another five since I've used it, so I'm not really up on what's been happening.

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#2 2020-01-20 18:07:13

loqs
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Registered: 2014-03-06
Posts: 17,192

Re: Fun or foolish: upgrading a system from 2013

Have a look at the number of manual interventions you would need to handle from August 2013 documented on https://www.archlinux.org/news/
Also the pacman from 2013 will not support hooks or zstd compression.  You would probably need to use the ALA with a date set to between each required intervention.
I would suggest from the amount of time required a data backup,  clean install followed by restore the backup would be much quicker.

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#3 2020-01-20 18:19:57

schard
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From: Hannover
Registered: 2016-05-06
Posts: 1,932
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Re: Fun or foolish: upgrading a system from 2013

You may be able to circumvent the old pacman version's shortcomings by upgrading from an up-to-date live system using --sysroot.
But I'd be prepared to fail and perform a clean installation.
In any case you might want to backup your system before tinkering with it in order to be able to replay configuration files and user data.

Last edited by schard (2020-01-20 18:20:29)

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#4 2020-01-20 21:45:26

eschwartz
Fellow
Registered: 2014-08-08
Posts: 4,097

Re: Fun or foolish: upgrading a system from 2013

Xiong Chiamiov wrote:

This weekend I pulled out my fileserver and booted it up.  It's been longer since I used it than I thought - according to /var/log/boot, August 2013.  Based on the logs and my recollection, it had been about a year since I had been using it at that point, and doing that upgrade was a bit of a pain.  It looks like I got partway through the systemd migration?  It's installed, but not running, and the network configuration isn't moved over (and thus I have no network, which makes everything more complicated).

The systemd migration seems like it would be a lot of pain for no gain when upgrading a system.

Xiong Chiamiov wrote:

The main thing is that I had two mdadm arrays that were then LVMed together, with a bunch of data on them, and I'd rather not lose that and I'm nervous about having to rebuild those.  (I also appear to have bought another set of drives and installed them, but never set them up?  Too bad, they'd be much cheaper now.)

Thoughts?  It's been probably a decade now since I've installed Arch and another five since I've used it, so I'm not really up on what's been happening.

Remove the operating system using rm -rf, preserving any data you want, but leave your disks configured as-is. Install Arch fresh onto the still-configured disks.

The first thing you'd do when starting from scratch would anyways be to build the disks, then follow up on that by installing Arch, so... why wipe that only to redo it? It's not an OS, it's the stuff that comes before the OS.

Same reason you don't need to start off an Arch install with fdisk and mkfs if you already have an existing linux install that you are junking.

loqs wrote:

Have a look at the number of manual interventions you would need to handle from August 2013 documented on https://www.archlinux.org/news/
Also the pacman from 2013 will not support hooks or zstd compression.  You would probably need to use the ALA with a date set to between each required intervention.
I would suggest from the amount of time required a data backup,  clean install followed by restore the backup would be much quicker.

Amazing, the ALA had actually just started in that exact month. o_O


Managing AUR repos The Right Way -- aurpublish (now a standalone tool)

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