Easily upgrade from CentOS 3.6 to 4.2

To counter-strike all the rants and posts I have seen on the web about how difficult it was to upgrade from CentOS 3 to 4, this post is here to testify it was actually easy -at least for a friend and myself-.

I’ve been wandering around trying to find people experiences about such an upgrade and all i found was complains, failures, rants and so. Until my friend said the night before, he had upgraded without any problem

Ok, here it goes, my little guide on how I proceeded :

<code>- Grab the server version of CentOS 4.2 at ftp://ftp.belnet.be/mirror/ftp.centos.org/4.2/isos/i386/CentOS-4.2.ServerCD-i386.iso
- Burn it ! :)
- Boot your machine with your brand new CD
- At the boot prompt, type "linux askmethod upgradeany"
- The installer will request you to set up the network..
- When asking which method to use to install packages, choose FTP :
Server : ftp.belnet.be
Directory : /mirror/ftp.centos.org/4.2/os/i386/
- Let the installer proceed
- When required, reboot</code>

Then you just need to update any other package not originally from CentOS repositories, and you are done !

It worked great for my server (no windows manager or such useless stuff for a server), I can’t swear it would work fine on a desktop system though :)

More info : http://mirror.centos.org/centos/4/docs/html/rhel-ig-x8664-multi-en-4/ap-upgrade.html