darkness

Upgraded my FC1 firewall to CentOS 4 last night. Went fairly well, really. My procedure was something like:

1. Follow yum upgrade instructions from CentOS forums. I had to install the kernel by hand, resolve a few dependencies, etc., but this worked not so bad.
2. find / -name '*.rpm[sn]' (all the .rpmsave and .rpmnew files) and handle them.

Actually, there was a whole bunch of stuff I did. I’d say I should have written it down, but for anyone familiar with Linux it was just a bunch of typical tasks.

One thing that got me is this: CentOS 4 (and presumably RHEL 4) doesn’t support ReiserFS. At all. Used to be in a kernel-unsupported package, but now even that’s gone. Rescue disk wouldn’t read my disk. So I decided to migrate to LVM and ext3. For this task I used Knoppix 3.7 to resize the ReiserFS partition down, then used Ubuntu to make LVM and ext3 (because that version of Knoppix doesn’t include LVM, methinks). Then Grub got screwed up so I had to re-run grub-install; used CentOS 4 disc 1 in rescue mode for that. Moral of the story: if you like RH, or even Fedora distributions, save yourself hassle and keep away from ReiserFS. (On another note, ReiserFS may or may not work with SELinux. I kind of gather that patches to make ReiserFS and SELinux play nice are in the works and very close to being in the upstream—if they’re not there already. At least check it out if you’re interested in both of these things working together on the same system.)

Found a repository with Fedora Extras rebuilt for CentOS 4. Used DKMS package from there to get MPPE support in CentOS 4. Also replaced IPsec on my wireless side with OpenVPN which was incredibly simple. I love OpenVPN.