How To Upgrade From VB 1.10 to VB 2.0 Using The Command Line

[Ron Olsen]

EDIT on Nov 19, 2011: This procedure has been replaced by a newer, faster, upgrade procedure that does not do an intermediate upgrade to Fedora 15:

See*How to Upgrade VB 1.10 to VB 2.0: Fast Method

Users are encouraged to try the new procedure instead of the one described here.

*

I developed a command-line upgrade procedure to go from VB 1.10/Fedora 14 to VB 2.0/Fedora 16. I tested it on a fresh VB 1.10 ISO install in a virtual machine on my Mac, and it seemed to work fine. *I have not tested it on real hardware, however. Nor have I tested it on VB 1.10 systems that have had extra packages installed or other user modifications.

I wrote a wiki article:*How To Upgrade from VB 1.10 to VB 2.0 Using the Command Line

Check it out. *Note that the procedure is NOT guaranteed to work, and you should have an up-to-date backup of your VB media library and other config directories, in case you need to do a fresh ISO install to fix a broken system that won't boot. Packages that you installed from third-party sources that are not in the standard VortexBox, Fedora, and atrpms repositories may cause problems and may cause the upgrade procedure to fail.

There are likely to be updates to the wiki article as more experience is gained with the procedure.

I hope that Andrew can test this procedure in his lab on real hardware, and come up with additions and modifications, and perhaps capture some of the steps in a higher-level script so less typing is required.

Let me know if you have any questions or run into problems.

[Ron Olsen]

This evening I used the command-line procedure to upgrade my VortexBox Appliance from VB 1.10 to VB 2.0.

The upgrade worked, and I'm up and running on VB 2.0 without having to restore any of my media library in /storage.

Here are my comments on the process:

* The /boot partition on my VBA was too full, and I got some error messages about running out of space on the /boot partition. I had to delete some old Fedora 14 kernels and take other steps to reclaim space. I updated the wiki article to show what I had to do.

* This was a problem because my VBA is two years old, and originally had VortexBox 0.9 installed on it. Back then the /boot partition was sized at 194 MB, which is barely enough for the command-line upgrade. Newer VortexBox installs have a much larger /boot partition, and should not run into this problem.

* There are several times during the process when you issue a command, and there is no output on the monitor for several minutes. *It seems as if the process has hung, but it has not. Be patient, even if all you see for several minutes is a blinking cursor. *Eventually you'll see more output on the screen and breathe a sigh of relief that things are actually moving along. This happened several times after issuing a preupgrade-cli command, and also after a reboot command.

* The upgrade process takes some time; allow several hours to do it. With the problems I had running out of space on /boot, it took me around 5 hours. If you don't run into this problem, it should only take an hour or two.

* Since the upgrade, I have played music using Logitech Media Server, ripped a CD, and mirrored FLAC to mp3. *The VortexBox Samba shares are visible on my Mac with the name "vortexbox". *Subsonic, bliss, DLNA server, MusicIP, and VortexBox Player are all working.

* The VB Auto Ripper worked to rip a CD, but my changes to /etc/ripit/config were overwritten, and I had to restore them to get the directory structure I wanted for ripped CDs.

* The DAAP server (forked-daapd) is up and running, but I could not connect to the iTunes library on my Mac. * iTunes tried to connect, but failed after a minute or so. *This may be a problem with iTunes 10.5.

* I got shellinabox working, but had to edit the config file due to a bug in the VB 2.0 version. Andrew should have a fixed version of shellinabox available in the VB 2.0 repo in a day or two.

* The System Information screen in the VB GUI didn't work with the error

HDDTemp error: 111, Connection refused

as was seen by another user doing the command-line upgrade. I ultimately replaced the /var/www/html/phpsysinfo directory with the 3.0.14 version, and I got that to work.

* All-in-all, it was a time-consuming but ultimately successful effort.

* I was prepared with the VB 2.0 ISO burned to a CD just in case the command-line procedure failed, but fortunately I didn't have to use it.

* Doing an ISO install is much faster, but then it can take quite a bit of time to restore the VB media library from a USB backup drive. The ISO install and media library restore requires a lot less mental effort, however.

* My VBA is heavily modified, with lots of extra packages beyond the basics. If your VB is more standard, the upgrade process should take less time.

* I encourage you to try the command-line procedure if you don't want to lose all your application settings and other custom modifications, and don't want to spend the time restoring the media library from a backup drive. *You have to be somewhat comfortable on the Linux command line, but each step is spelled out in detail in the wiki article.

Good luck. *Anyone attempting the command-line procedure should report their results in this thread.

[divreg]

Those with software RAID arrays will likely run into a traceback with the following error

preupgrade.error.PUError: /boot is on RAID device md0

as mentioned here:*https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=504826. *

I have a RAID 0 array between two drives. *This happens either by preupgrading from 14 --> 15 and 14 --> 16.

[Ron Olsen]

Thanks for the info. I'll add it to the wiki article.

Also note that the preupgrade 14 > 16 may be broken, and awaiting a fix from Fedora.

But some Fedora documentation says it's working: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/.....PreUpgrade

It would be interesting if someone was willing to experiment wirh a direct F14 > F16 upgrade on a non-RAID system.

[divreg]

Thanks for the info. *Yes, Fedora 14 --> 16 does work on non-raid systems. *I have done this on a physical device and a virtual machine, though I haven't tried with Vortexbox, just pure fedora. *If I recall right, skipping releases in preupgrade has worked for a number of releases now.

Now, Fedora does allow a standard upgrade from the dvd image. *Is this possible in the advanced install option of the VortexBox disc? **

[Ron Olsen]

Aha! The the Fedora documentation that says F14 > F16 preupgrade is broken: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/.....figuration

But you've gotten this to work, so I'll have to look at this bug report more closely.

Comment #72 in this bug report: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=737731#c72
says that F14 preupdate hasn't been fixed to allow direct upgrade to F16.

Comment is dated 2011-11-10 11:50:41 EST

[divreg]

You are correct. *I looked and it was a F14 > F15 > F16 upgrade in the VM, after grub broke. *Since it was only a few extra minutes, this was the procedure for the physical machine too. Thanks for getting that straight!*

[Patricia P]

Ron, thank you for your very helpful Howto.

I used it on my headless Acer atom to upgrade to VB 2.0

Simple setup of Vortexbox 1.10 on an Acer* 3610 Atom nettop, with 1GB RAM. Music in flac format 41.4GB. Squeezebox 7.6.3 with various plugins and settings. SB3; Cable Broadband

I don’t use itunes or DAAP,

1 * *copied the file folder to a USB drive

2 * *burned an iso of vortexbox 2.0

3 * *I looked for the etc folder on the Explorer window and didn’t find them, so couldn’t save it. Didnt research using Putty and vi, but remember this is a fairly easy operation.

I followed the instructions at http://info.vortexbox.org/tiki.....ge=Upgrade

My Acer is sitting on the Hifi shelf, and I thought twice about taking it down, attaching it to a monitor, so decided I would try to work via SSH from my Windows 7 laptop, and when the instructions mention F15 Graphical Installer I knew it would need about 30 mins to deal with the preinstall (F14-F15] before I could enter as root.

Just as promised, the preupgrade took a few minutes to download the 738 packages to upgrade to fedora 15. I rebooted, and let the Acer install. I tested the SSH after 5 mins but was unable to access as the OS was installing these packages.

It took 20 minutes for the beep of another restart to occur, and a minute later I was able to SSH into the OS.


preupgrade-cli "Fedora 16 (Verne)"


No problems encountered, just assessing the packages needed. 597 packages this time to upgrade to F16.

I followed the guide including upgrading VB packages and removing all packages not found in the VB 2.0 iso.

Squeezebox has upgraded to 7.7.0 and my settings have been saved. The VB Player was set to “not start”, and did not appear in the LMP drop down list (as I will now call the SBS).

The system information page works fine.*

*

I am very happy with every aspect of the upgrade so far. Considering other people's experiences, perhaps their pain has led to improvements. I feel I have benefited by the expertise of the forum, so thank you again.

Any questions or tests you want to make - *just let me know.*

[Ron Olsen]

Thanks for the report and glad the upgrade worked so smoothly for you, Patricia.

As your experience shows, it is possible to do the command-line upgrade via ssh/PuTTY/CryptoTerm from another computer on your network, using the beep on the VB to identify the time of a reboot.

This can work if the Fedora Graphical Installer, which displays its output on a monitor attached to the VB, does not run into problems. If the preupgrade step completes without a warning about the /boot partition being too full, then the Fedora Installer should not run into problems, and the ssh approach will likely work.

Personally, I like to watch the progress of the Fedora Installer on a monitor attached to the VB.
I had several instances where I ignored warnings from preupgrade about not enough space on /boot, and the Fedora Installer failed. Being able to see the Fedora Installer output on the VB monitor was crucial to seeing this error.

So be careful if you use the ssh approach because you can't see the Fedora Installer output, and realize that if things go wrong with the Installer, or with the reboot after the Installer finishes, you'll have to attach a monitor to the VB to figure out what happened.

[Patricia P]

That is why I prepared the iso - just in case I got out of my depth I would be able to reinstall the OS from scratch.*

The network issue is still there - Network explorer does not show the Vortexbox as a networked computer.

Start, \vortexbox opens Explorer window and gives access to music files etc.

\IPaddress_of _vortexbox also worked.

Once I closed the explorer window, on reopening the vortexbox needs to be mapped again.*

However MP3TAG is able to access this drive, even when Network explorer cannot see it. After a minute or so Vortexbox appears as a network computer.*

This doesn't last, unfortunately.*