The ELC Community Blog

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Upgrade EC2 FC4/Base to FC5

by Ryan Garver on November 02, 2006

I recently upgraded the baseline Fedora Core 4 image for EC2 to Fedora Core 5. Thanks to Graeme Mathieson who provided a great step by step procedure for the upgrade which I have updated from my experience for your benefit. If you are trying to do the same thing let me warn you that you should probably start with a fresh FC4 base image without Apache or MySQL (the public image is fine). We had a snapshot that we were building off of from early in the EC2 beta that was very constrained for space on the root file system. It appears that the EC2 guys increased the image size on the base images to facilitate this kind of upgrade.

Step 1 is to update the repository information from the RedHat servers. This basically sets up the yum configuration files with new data.

rpm -Uhv http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/core/5/i386/os/Fedora/RPMS/fedora-release-5-5.noarch.rpm

Next we need to get the new information in the right files for yum to work correctly. This is a two step process:

1. Move the new configuration files over the old files
   

   mv /etc/yum.repos.d/fedora-extras.repo{.rpmnew,}

2. Update the new files to actually expose the urls. By default this is commented out
   

   # Edit /etc/yum.repos.d/fedora-{extras|updates|core}.repo and remove the comments

Now, on to the update. This will do the full system update. If you haven't started your screen session yet, I recommend it for this next step. This will take a very long time and will install/upgrade the entire base install

yum update -y

And a final check to make sure everything went smoothly.

yum update

I'll be continuing this in a later post covering our setup of Apache 2.2 with mod_proxy_balancer, MySQL 5, and a full Ruby on Rails suite on this base install. Stay tuned!

UPDATE: The next in the series is now available