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 Post subject: R6 Upgrade Guide?
PostPosted: Sat Sep 19, 2009 6:13 pm 
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Location: Salem, MA
For the past versions of Knoppmyth, there was an upgrade guide written by tjc. Is there a version of this guide for R6 that I'm not seeing? Thanks!

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 Post subject:
PostPosted: Sun Sep 20, 2009 4:27 am 
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I'm sure tjc will get around to doing it once R6 goes final or a little before perhaps. Till now, my best advice is to completely backup your current HDD to another one using gparted if you want a >99% chance of going back to your R5.5 box.

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 Post subject:
PostPosted: Sun Sep 20, 2009 11:20 am 
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Yeah, no guide to date, partly due the sheer scope of the changes, partly due to some blocking issues with my production hardware, and mostly due to lack of time (as the result of a new and very demanding job at a company that is still in start up mode). This is a perennial problem with FOSS projects.

As a starting point, there are some wiki pages with R6 information (http://www.knoppmythwiki.org/index.php?page=view/R5.5%2FR6.x+Differences+Table+and+Equivalent+Commands) and any number of threads here in the forums.

The basics never really change:

    - Make a good backup, following graysky's recommendation of a complete image is highly recommended but not required. If you have applied customizations or update to the current system make sure your backup includes them.

    - Convert your /etc/fstab to UUIDs. I've posted about how to do this a couple times in the past few months. This private posting even points to a utility script I wrote to simplify the process:

    tjc wrote:
    I'm putting together a utility script to convert old style /etc/fstab to use UUID device identification to ease R5 -> R6 upgrades. Before turning it loose on the world I was hoping to get some testers to give it a try. It's currently neutered so that it doesn't write back to your /etc/fstab and just prints what it would produce to stdout. If you're happy with the output there is a comment at the bottom of the script on how to enable the actual update.

    You'll need to download the following scripts from the wiki and make fstab_convert.sh executable:

    fstab_convert.sh - The script that does the fstab conversion.
    editor.py - My Python text editing library.

    Usage: Put both files in the same directory, make the .sh file executable, cd to that directory, and run ./fstab_convert.sh

    Verify the output against your old /etc/fstab and the output from blkid to be sure it's right, then enable the actual change (see the directions in the script itself), and run it again.


    NOTE: Unlike R5.5 and earlier you should generally not restore your /etc/fstab from the backup. R6 does a pretty good job of transferring it and if it reformats your root partition it's UUID will change, meaning the old one will be wrong.

    - If you have /myth on an LVM volume you're in for some serious manual work and experimentation. This is one of the issues that gave me a lot of trouble in attempts to upgrade my production hardware. The best path may simply be to replace it with separate partitions using the MythTV storage groups before attempting the upgrade. This thread has some info: http://knoppmyth.net/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=20091

    - Copy your backup to /root/backup which is an alternate place that the new installer looks. This may not be necessary but it definitely helped with my LVM case.

    - Run the installer and pick the upgrade option so it uses your existing configuration and doesn't reformat the /myth partition.

    - Be aware the the post install configuration points have changed a great deal due to the switch from a debian to Arch Linux base, and many of the things that used to require manual configuration can now be done from the services menu. Some things that I'm aware of:

      - Be sure to check flyspray for any known issues if you encounter problems: http://linhes.org/flyspray/

      - Running pacman -Syu as root will update your system to the latest patches in the repository. You should do this before diving into the service menu for post install configuration.

      - The LVM thing mentioned above. The old recreate_lvm.sh script is not included, and the timing of when you would need to run something like it is different (much earlier).

      - Different versions of X which may not like your old /etc/X11/xorg.conf file. This is another thing that tripped me up in my attempts to upgrade the production system. For now I'd recommend not restoring it and letting the installer build you a new one. Later you can edit in any necessary tweaks.

      - Adding things to run at boot time is now very different due to the switch from SysV init to runit. Search for "sudo sv" and "sudo addservice.sh" and "runit" for more details. (e.g. this thread: http://knoppmyth.net/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=19621)

      - Files which should not be restored from your backup on an upgrade:
        - /etc/xorg.conf - There are enough X server differences that this will probably break X. You'll need to merge things selectively by hand.
        - /etc/fstab - Even if you've converted it to UUIDs prior to the upgrade. When the root partition is reformatted its UUID will change, so the system will not boot properly with the old one.


Last edited by tjc on Sat Nov 21, 2009 9:21 am, edited 1 time in total.


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 Post subject:
PostPosted: Sun Sep 20, 2009 3:03 pm 
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Location: Salem, MA
Thanks very much for taking the time to post this stuff, tjc. I wasn’t aware of all the changes, so this definitely helps.

I'm just taking out the exiting hard drive with my R5F27 installation, so if anything goes awry I can just swap drives out...

Thanks again, and congrats on the new job. Doing work for real money is always more rewarding ;-)

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 Post subject:
PostPosted: Sun Sep 20, 2009 3:23 pm 
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Location: Salem, MA
Ugh, this UUID stuff seems really annoying to me. Is there some advantage I'm missing? In the past I knew that /dev/hda1 was the first partition on the drive connected master on the primary IDE header. Now there's some random UUID? And are these IDs unique to the drive? For example, if I replaced a drive in the system would that mess up my fstab? What are we gaining by dealing with these long-stringed non-intuitive numbers?

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 Post subject:
PostPosted: Sun Sep 20, 2009 3:28 pm 
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Location: Salem, MA
I guess I'll partially answer my own question. Here is what the Arch devs have to say about it:
http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Per ... ice_naming

At least they have a reason, and I suppose it's a matter of preference. It'd just be nice if there was a way to still use /dev/hda type naming with a configuration change.

I would definitely argue with this reason, though: "Persistent naming just looks prettier."

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 Post subject:
PostPosted: Sun Sep 20, 2009 3:33 pm 
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Of course you can... it's your /etc/fstab after all. Do it how ever you want.

http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Fstab

I prefer to give my partitions a name and use the LABEL=xxx instead of /dev/sdXY but again, do it however you want.

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 Post subject:
PostPosted: Sun Sep 20, 2009 5:30 pm 
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Location: Salem, MA
I wouldn't mind using a label. However, I noticed tjc's post here that UUID seemed to perform better. Have you not had similar experiences?

This is what tjc said: "OBTW - I had to rollback before being able to verify it but using UUID seems to work better than labels."

How do you set the label of a HD?

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 Post subject:
PostPosted: Sun Sep 20, 2009 5:38 pm 
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Location: /dev/null
Setting a label of an ext4 partition:
Code:
e2label /dev/sdX "Label"


I assume it would work the same way for ext2/ext3 as well.

I haven't noticed any performance differences using labels vs. UUIDs. Honestly, I haven't run into problem w/ the old /dev/sdXY pattern although if you add drives, or if drives change controllers I can see how they are too rigid and can mess up stuff. What I don't like about UUIDds is that the huge string are meaningless to me. I can remember that /myth is /dev/sda3 for example and that /dev/sda1 is my root file system.

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 Post subject:
PostPosted: Sun Sep 20, 2009 7:25 pm 
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UUIDs are ugly, but they're supposed to be relatively unique, and as you've learned, they were invented to solve a really thorny problem. As for the annoyance level, the script designed to minimize the pain involved in converting your /etc/fstab.

The "UIIDs work better than labels" (which I also prefer) thing is an ease of upgrade issue not a performance issue. After the install you can change fstab to use whatever you want, but for the upgrade I recommend UUIDs. Anything else is trying to skate up an icefall.

For documentation purposes I copied the original mount lines back into my fstab as comments, but blkid will also list them any time you want them.


Last edited by tjc on Tue Sep 22, 2009 9:25 pm, edited 1 time in total.


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 Post subject:
PostPosted: Sun Sep 20, 2009 8:06 pm 
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Quote:
- If you have /myth on an LVM volume you're in for some serious manual work and experimentation. This is one of the issues that gave me a lot of trouble in attempts to upgrade my production hardware. The best path may simply be to replace it with separate partitions using the MythTV storage groups before attempting the upgrade. This thread has some info: http://knoppmyth.net/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=20091


My LVM is working quite nice. Just make sure that "uselvm" is set to yes in /etc/rc.conf. Also, I do think that I had a problem since i did not export my LVM before i upgraded, but was still able to get it working :wink:. Can't really remember too much more about my install experience right now, just that my R6 install is working quite nice. This is definitely the most stable mythtv distro out there.


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 Post subject:
PostPosted: Sun Sep 20, 2009 8:33 pm 
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Location: Salem, MA
Okay, thanks for all the help and suggestions everyone.

Fry's was having a sale on 1.5TB drives for $97 so I just picked one of those up and I'm going to run that as my only MythTV drive for awhile. So I guess all this UUID and LVM stuff won't bother me for now.

Plus, if I add drives in the future, I'm not going to go the LVM route. I lost one drive awhile back and that killed my whole array...

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 Post subject:
PostPosted: Sun Sep 20, 2009 8:35 pm 
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Oh, and I'm assuming that the fstab for network drives is still the same in R6? I have a separate frontend and backend system so I have to mount /myth from my backend onto my frontend.

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 Post subject:
PostPosted: Mon Sep 21, 2009 1:27 am 
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kmkittre wrote:
Oh, and I'm assuming that the fstab for network drives is still the same in R6? I have a separate frontend and backend system so I have to mount /myth from my backend onto my frontend.


Yeah, Linux is Linux. KM is based on Debian and LH is based on Arch. Just a different flavor of ice cream in the same shoppe :)

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 Post subject:
PostPosted: Mon Sep 21, 2009 6:17 am 
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Location: Salem, MA
Thanks graysky.

Just trying to make sure that Arch wasn't secretly some weird ice cream flavor like bean sprout ;-)

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