perfSONAR User Q&A and Other Discussion

[Mark Feit <>]

Larry Blunk writes:

 

We have a number of remote perfsonar nodes still running CentOS 6 and thus stuck at Perfsonar 4.0.  My understanding when I looked at this a few years ago was that it wasn't possible to do an upgrade and a reinstall was required.   However, I'm finding a few recent blog postings suggesting it's possible to do an upgrade –

 

Upgrades are possible but have the potential to turn messy or leave you with a system you can’t access at all if things go wrong.  The CentOS team recommends fresh installations over upgrades; we recommend the same and would be unable to support debugging problems with an upgraded system.

 

Alternatively, it looks like one might be able to do a remote kickstart install.

 

That’s probably the safest alternative, and you have the option of fine-tuning the process in a VM before you try it out on the real thing.

 

Something to consider for the future if you don’t have console access is installing a USB stick with iPXE on your remote machines.  You can do some clever things with iPXE that would allow you to boot something different by making it present on a web server and falling back to booting the local disk if that fails.

 

--Mark