In my unending quest to find an easy way to upgrade 32-bit Linux (Fedora) systems to 64-bit systems on headless boxes at remote sites (i.e. don't need to go onsite), I think I may have thought of a way. Can I get uber-genius approval? (Distro doesn't matter, same thought process should work on any distro/packagemgr.)
0. starting point is a working 32-bit userland and kernel install with ssh access only
1. install (force) 64b kernel on running 32b system, leave userland 32b, reboot. Though not supported by Fedora, this should work in theory, says the kernel guys.
2. trick dnf (nee yum; think apt-get) into thinking the system is 64 somehow (many ways to do this)
3. run dnf upgrade distsync (i.e. I'll go from F23 to F24 at the same time), all userland goes 64, manually delete any leftover 32's that aren't normally on a 64 system.
4. reboot, now kernel and ul are both 64
... might work?? A completely offsite way to pull off this extremely tricky but urgently needed process? Potential gotchas? Maybe in step 3 the order of installs of libs vs bins goes wonky causing failure of forking / execing of new bg (think pre/postinstall) ps's?
(Yes, I'll remember to ascii dump and stop any bitness-sensitive-data progs like mysql first, then restore from ascii.)