twistedgenes.com – Blogs by Rakesh Gupta

Recently a lot of issues have turned up with my ISP provider, Reliance Communications in this case. I happen to use multiple laptops and a router. They lock a system based on MAC address or a long duration dhcp lease file. There are various ways to get rid of this situation. A few which I could figure out and seem to work are

– Do neatly logout of their web application, before switching machines. As they keep the records, which would not let you login using a different machine till a session timeout which ranges from 0.5 to 6 hours.

– Spoof Your MAC Address, if you are using multiple laptops/desktops

use ifconfig utility:

MAC address can be changed very easily using ifconfig. Run the following command as root user.

#ifconfig eth0 down hw ether address

eth0 is the name of the interface/NIC which address is to be changed.

down means the NIC is to be shutdown before changing address.

hw ether means hardware address class is ether(which indicates ethernet).

address is the address which will used as the new mac.

After the successful execution of the command. start the NIC again using the command:

# /sbin/ifconfig eth0 up

– Release your IP after successful log out

# dhclient -r -pf  < path to the current dhclient pid file >

The path of current dhclient pid file can be found using

# ps -eaf  | grep dhclient

Path is usually /var/run/dhclient-eth0.pid or /var/run/dhclient-wlan0.pid

An upgrade of Fedora Core version normally requires burning the new version’s image in a DVD or CDs.  An alternate approach to the same is upgrading by copying the same to a hard drive or a pen drive. The approach mentioned below worked very well from me for an upgrade of FC9 to FC10.

Download the new version’s (say FC 10)  iso(DVD) image and save it to a disk drive partition. I used a pen drive for the same. It works very well for filesystems viz. FAT32,ext2 and not NTFS. Copy the image file to any directory say for example /mnt/FedoraCoreDVD.iso( Assuming, that pen drive is mounted at /mnt) . Mount the iso image in a directory(any) to extract the isolinux folder.

#mount -o loop /mnt/FedoraCoreDVD.iso /home/user/Fedora/

Copy the isolinux folder and paste it inside the boot folder.

#cp -r /home/user/Fedora/isolinux /boot

Now we need to make an entry in the grub file to boot the copied isolinux folder’s install.img

# cat /etc/grub.conf

______________________________

title Fedora Upgrade
root (hd0,8) ———–> should be your  partition containing the current linux installation (0->First Hard Drive,8-> Partition number on this drive )
kernel /isolinux/vmlinuz
initrd /isolinux/initrd.img
______________________________

Copy the isolinux folder also to the pen drive(/dev/sdb, mounted at /mnt in this case) and reboot the system. Select the ” Fedora Upgrade” option in grub and the normal installation/upgrade demon anaconda will start. It will ask for the option of disk partition and folder containing the iso image and iso linux folder, which is /dev/sdb1 in this case. Select the same and the upgradation works like a charm.