Remotely upgrading my office workstation to Fedora 32 worked fine

October 25, 2020

One of the things I've been worried about during the current long length of working from home has been upgrading my office workstation to Fedora 32. Upgrading my home machine is straightforward (at one level) because I'm here right in front of it and I can probably sort out anything that goes wrong (although that's complicated by my home machine being my Internet gateway). I'm not in front of my office workstation, so either I was going to have to make a trip in to the office or I would have to take the scary approach of a completely remote upgrade and reboot.

Well, this Friday I did the remote upgrade and it worked smoothly. As usual, I did it through a live upgrade with DNF, which let me monitor all of the package updates to watch for alarming messages (there weren't any), check that DKMS had properly rebuilt my ZFS on Linux kernel modules before reboot, and so on. The post upgrade reboot was smooth, judging from the fact that my office machine was back on the air in about 45 seconds.

At one level this is what I had been expecting. My office machine rebooted fine on its own after a power glitch (cf), and then I got daring enough to do a remote kernel upgrade. I also got an encouraging success report on Twitter. At another level I didn't quite believe that it would work smoothly until it did, and I still feel happy and glad that it did.

(I'd like to say that it's been a fairly long time since a Fedora upgrade went wrong on me, but in fact it was only last year, followed by another problem on a kernel upgrade. So in one sense I really did sort of get lucky, although I likely would have found that sort of problem on my home machine, which I upgraded first.)

Having it really work is reassuring, because it seems very likely that we'll be working from home for enough longer that I'll get to do it again. Well, beyond the little fact that Fedora 33 comes out in a few days.

(I never immediately upgrade to newly released Fedora versions; other people can find the problems for me. But I'm now much more likely to upgrade to 33 in early December or something.)

Written on 25 October 2020.
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Last modified: Sun Oct 25 00:54:06 2020
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