Distro upgradation on running machine!

[pareshan]

Hi All!

I know its pretty weird question.

I have a server running few services like webhosting and few monitoring scripts on REDHAT 9. Now i want to remove that redhat 9 and upgrade to some other distro like Fedora or any other whose update support is alive.
sine i donot have any backup macine to shift my running services to it.
Is it possible to upgrade system to other distro while keeping all the servces running during the process???

i can afford 1 or 2 restarts ...

[budman7]

To upgrade, you should only need one restart. And that is to boot with the dvd.
Check www.distrowatch.com for Fedora Core. They also have SRPM's of RHEL for free, at distrowatch.

[puntmuts]

The short answer is: probably not, unless the new distro provides some upgrade path

The longer answer is that you could prepare an image of a tested and configured distro using a distrokernel and copy it to a running machine (different partition/disc) and activate some bootloader for it and it takes 1 reboot if prepared properly. But that takes a different machine to prepare the thing. If you do not have such a machine (a simple machine could do if you are using a distro kernel for example )

[budman7]

Why not just send the people that are using your service an email, telling them that you will be down for an hour or so on a cetain day and time.

[Cabhan]

Yeah, you're basically gonna have to boot into the DVD directly, install everything, then reconfigure everything and restore backups if necessary.

As a precaution, I'd agree with budman; just let everyone know, then do it on that computer.