With the release of a new Fedora getting close (Fedora 21 is currently scheduled for release December 9th), I figured this last weekend was a great time to upgrade the ‘production’ side of my home machines to Fedora 21.
I have 2 pretty important machines. One is my production virthost. It also acts as my firewall and router for all my networks (external, wireless, the test network to the test virthost, the internal network, etc). The second is a vm running on that virthost that is my mail hub, vpn end point and other important functions.
Of course the first thing to do before any major upgrade is to check backups. I run nightly backups with rdiff-backup to my main virthost, but also I have a encrypted external drive I sync those updates to from time to time, and off site where I can upload them too. I made sure everything was synced up and looked good.
The official way to upgrade between Fedora releases is ‘fedup’. However, my main virthost is a bit of a weird setup with raid and encryption and such, so I usually just do a yum update on it, and since I am doing that on the virthost, I usually just do the same on the vm as well. This time (like the last few upgrades) everything went very smoothly. No conflicts or issues with the upgrade transactions on either host, took a bit of time to do them, but finished with no issues.
Then, a quick reboot and I was up in Fedora 21. Well, mostly. I ran into a issue with my ‘internal’ bridge. I had not listed the HWADDR for the network interface that should be on the internal bridge, and Fedora 20’s NetworkManager was fine with figuring it out, but for some reason Fedora 21’s didn’t get it added right. I had to set the HWADDR and restart a number of things. I thne ran into a minor issue with my ipv6 tunnel, but got it sorted in short order.
So, at least for me, Fedora 21 upgrades were as easy as they have always been.