[LON-CAPA-admin] upgrading from version 2.6.3

[Bob Gonzales]

Just to close out my part of the thread:

I did the upgrade from 2.6.3 to 2.9.0 and the OS upgrade from FC8 to CentOS
5 at the same time.  Only found one small problem, so far, which has been
worked out already.   Everything else appears to be working.  We've got two
of our summer term chemistry courses (about 50 students) using it.  

Thanks for all the help!
Bob Gonzales
Binghamton University
Chemistry Dept
4400 Vestal Parkway East
Binghamton, NY  13902
(607)777-2698
rgonzal at binghamton.edu

-----Original Message-----
From: lon-capa-admin-admin at mail.lon-capa.org
[mailto:lon-capa-admin-admin at mail.lon-capa.org] On Behalf Of Gerd Kortemeyer
Sent: Thursday, May 27, 2010 10:26 AM
To: lon-capa-admin at mail.lon-capa.org
Subject: Re: [LON-CAPA-admin] upgrading from version 2.6.3

Hi,

On May 26, 2010, at 5:49 PM, Stuart Raeburn wrote:

> I would, however, recommend updating your FC8 Linux distro when
convenient. (For example this could occur later in the summer, e.g., after a
LON-CAPA 2.6.3 -> 2.9.0 upgrade).  Fedora's official end of life for FC8 was
1/7/2009.  CentOS provides longer support times for its releases (e.g.,
CentOS 5 will receive full updates until 3/31/11, and maintenance updates
until 3/31/14).


I would like to emphasize this point: Fedora, SuSE, Ubuntu, etc., are fun
and user-friendly desktop systems, but not very fit for a server.
Personally, I am very (very!) inclined to stop future support for these
desktop distributions, but of course that needs to be a board decision. I
did however take the liberty to set an end to the Commodore 64 support.

I would like to strongly encourage server administrators to instead run an
"enterprise" or "server" distribution (CentOS, Redhat Enterprise, SuSE
Enterprise), for the reason Stuart explains above. We had very good
experiences with CentOS. Instructions for how to get CentOS going are at

 http://install.lon-capa.org/centos5_install.html

I know a number of you are taking this as an opportunity to upgrade your
hardware. Please see

 http://www.lon-capa.org/hardwareupgrade.html

for how to accomplish this task. Do the hardware upgrade first and then
immediately afterwards do the LON-CAPA upgrade. Note that we can go from
32-bit to 64-bit, but not vice versa.

If you would like to just upgrade your Linux distribution, see

 http://www.lon-capa.org/fedoracoreupdate.html

- while the URL says "fedoracoreupdate," this works for any distribution
change. Note that there are some subtle hints embedded into that page,
apparently sort of easily overlooked, since they are only in red and
repeated a few times.

General instructions on how to upgrade LON-CAPA are still at

 http://install.lon-capa.org/upgrade.html

(note that it should say "cd loncapa-2.9.0" in the gray box for our current
version). I did this on three very different machines for our current
version, it worked without a single glitch, and it only takes a few minutes
(we can thank Stuart for that).

- Gerd.








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