upgrade from SLES SP1 to SP3 after infrastructure change

SUSE Public Cloud Amazon-EC2
1

I read about the SuSE/AWS infrastructure change on this blog post: https://www.suse.com/communities/conversations/suse-linux-enterprise-server-aws-updates-shellshock/

We have some older AWS instances that were created from a SLES 11 sp1 AMI and have not been upgraded. We’d like to upgrade these to get them back to a supported patchlevel but it seems like the new SuSE infrastructure does not does not contain upgrade media for our old SP level. Is there a procedure for upgrading SuSE instances now that the SuSE AWS infrastructure has changed?

2

As of yesterday (2014-10-07) access to the old infrastructure has been restored. However, the old infrastructure is still going to be decommissioned at some point, timing TBD.

To upgrade your SP1 instances you will have to first upgrade to SP2 and then upgrade to SP3.

The following should work:

1.) Check the repositories configured in your instance

  • ls /etc/zypp/repos.d
    ~ If only the SP1 repositories are available:
    • cp susecloud:SLES11-SP1-Pool.repo susecloud:SLES11-SP2-Core.repo
    • sed -i s/SP1-Pool/SP2-Core/ susecloud:SLES11-SP2-Core.repo
    • cp susecloud:SLES11-SP1-Updates.repo susecloud:SLES11-SP2-Updates.repo
    • sed -i s/SP1/SP2/ susecloud:SLES11-SP2-Updates.repo
    • zypper refresh
    • zypper in zypper
    • zypper dup
      ~ If repositories for SP3 are available
    • cp susecloud:SLES11-SP3-Pool.repo susecloud:SLES11-SP3-Pool.repo.hide
    • cp susecloud:SLES11-SP3-Updates.repo susecloud:SLES11-SP3-Updates.repo.hide
    • zypper refresh
    • zypper in zypper
    • zypper dup

The basically repeat the above steps for upgrading to SP3, not the nsmae changes, in SP2 we had Core instead of Pool and in SP3 Pool re-appeared.

After you are at SP3 level you can use the process given in the blog to switch to the new infrastructure. Note that the process as given in the blog will change the default user to ec2-user from root and will regenerate the host keys for your instance. If you do not want this to happen