[NTLUG:Discuss] RedHat 6.1

[Jeff Rush]

Actually the big problems with RH 6.1 are much more painful.

1/ The upgrade mis-identifies existing NTFS and HPFS (OS/2) filesystems
     as ext2 type, and fails the install with an error message.  You have to
     run fdisk under the old version, change all those partition types to
     NeXTstep, perform the upgrade, and then set them all back.

2/ The upgrade blows away your Master Boot Record by always
    stuffing LILO into it.  For those that use Boot Manager, System Commander
    or some other boot selection software, this is a killer.  You cal
    backup and restore your MBR with:
           backup->   dd if=/dev/hda of=/home/me/somefile bs=512 count=1
           restore->    dd if=/home/me/somefile of=/dev/hda bs=512 count=1

   * note: use /dev/hda for IDE drives and /dev/sda for SCSI drives.

3/ The upgrade overwrites your /etc/lilo.conf and does not safe your
    'linear' or kernel options before doing so.  This disorients your disk
    geometry and can lead to disk corruption if you continue past this point.

There are ~300 other bugs but those are the only ones that probably
affect most upgrades.  Luckily once I got the one about NTFS/HPFS
partitions, I went to the Red Hat site and read about all the others, including
the workarounds.  Once I re-typed my partitions, backed up my MBR
and lilo.conf, the upgrade went w/o a hitch and my PC runs very nicely now.

I received an email from Red Hat today that the new boot/install images
now available -fix- these problems so MadHat's advice to check the updates
section on the Red Hat is doubly important now.

-Jeff Rush


On Thu, 21 Oct 1999 04:53:26 -0500, MadHat wrote:

>As most of you that like/use Red Hat know, 6.1 was recently released. 
>If you are using it, or planning on using it, I highly recomend watching
>the updates section of the RedHat web/ftp site for 6.1 
>
>ftp://updates.redhat.com/6.1/ 
>http://www.redhat.com/corp/support/errata/index.html
>
>There have already been a couple security fixes released (including PAM,
>lpr, and the latest ptys security issues) for it (in less than 3 weeks
>of being out) and I have seen some problems with the libs and programs
>(like the real G2 server) not working together properly.