Chapter 5. Upgrading Your Current System

This chapter explains those steps you'll see while performing an upgrade of Red Hat Linux 6.2.

What it Means to Upgrade

The installation process for Red Hat Linux 6.2 includes the ability to upgrade from prior versions of Red Hat Linux (version 2.0 and later) which are based on RPM technology.

	Please Note
	Performing an upgrade will NOT turn an existing Red Hat Linux system into a high availability server! You must perform a fresh Red Hat Linux installation in order to properly install Red Hat High Availability Server!

Upgrading your system installs the modular 2.2.x kernel as well as updated versions of the packages which are currently installed on your machine. The upgrade process preserves existing configuration files by renaming them using an .rpmsave extension (e.g., sendmail.cf.rpmsave) and leaves a log of the actions it took in /tmp/upgrade.log. As software evolves, configuration file formats can change, so you should carefully compare your original configuration files to the new files before integrating your changes.

	Please Note
	Some upgraded packages may require that other packages are also installed for proper operation. If you choose to customize your packages to upgrade, you may be required to resolve any dependency problems. Otherwise, the upgrade procedure takes care of these dependencies, but it may need to install additional packages which are not on your existing system.