Amazon EC2: Very old Fedora image!

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I wasn’t mistrustful enough at the beginning. One explanation is that i know Linux, but i never used Fedora before, so i didn’t know the actual version number….

How could i imagine that they provide a 2 years old image ? To remind, here is what they provide:

Version 8 is old enough that you can’t upgrade in one shot. You have to upgrade first to version 10 to then upgrade to version 11. I realized that trying to install nagios version 3 without being able to find it…

I found the way to upgrade through Amazon forums:

http://developer.amazonwebservices.com/connect/message.jspa?messageID=141707

In short:

Upgrade to version 10:

yum update -y yum clean all yum update -y yum clean all rpm -Uhv http://mirrors.kernel.org/fedora/releases/10/Fedora/i386/os/Packages/fedora-release-10-1.noarch.rpmhttp://mirrors.kernel.org/fedora/releases/10/Fedora/i386/os/Packages/fedora-release-notes-10.0.0-1.noarch.rpm yum clean all yum update -y yum clean all yum update -y yum clean all

Upgrade to version 11:

rpm -Uhv http://mirrors.kernel.org/fedora/releases/11/Fedora/i386/os/Packages/fedora-release-11-1.noarch.rpmhttp://mirrors.kernel.org/fedora/releases/11/Fedora/i386/os/Packages/fedora-release-notes-11.0.0-2.fc11.noarch.rpm yum clean all yum update -y yum clean all yum update -y yum clean all

I highly recommend to start by upgrading Fedora version before anything else. As i realized the problem close to the end of my setup, i had packages issues after upgrading, and even some packages i had to remove before upgrading due to dependencies problems!

Mysql

At least the flush privileges wasn’t working anymore:

mysql> flush privileges;
ERROR 1146 (42S02): Table 'mysql.servers' doesn't exist
I did a backup before upgrading, and this table wasn’t there anyway. I did a Mysql repair & upgrade:
mysqlcheck --all-databases --repair -u root -p mysql_upgrade -u root -p
Yum
Since the upgrade, calling it generate these messages, just before working anyway:
Loaded plugins: dellsysidplugin2, fastestmirror
ERR_OUT: : Bad address
ERR_OUT: : Bad address
ERR_OUT: : Bad address
ERR_OUT: : Bad address
ERR_OUT: : Bad address
I found the solution in this blog: http://d.hatena.ne.jp/const/20090909
It’s due to the smbios-utils package and smbios-utils-python, which helps to get bios informations. Since a virtual machine and i don’t have access to bios, i don’t care:
yum remove smbios-utils-python

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