R P Herrold wrote:
On Tue, 24 Oct 2006, David Eisner wrote:
With the end of Legacy support for RH9, I'd like to migrate my Fedora
Legacified RH9 box to Centos 3.
http://www.owlriver.com/tips/centos-31-ex-rhl-9/
Any thoughts on whether this should also work with the .legacy packages?
As author of the migration instructions in question, let me give an
unqualified "Yes, probably" .... ;)
I would feel safer 'stretching' into CentOS-4, just to get the later
kernel, and buying the longer lifespan, but a move with a set of CentOS
3.8 spins ISO images will work, if you are a dead plain install wholly
mediated by RPM, with minimal or no transition issues. But please:
1. level 0 backup
2. strip out unused packages -- a good idea
anyway
3. possibly reboot and force a full fsck on all
partitions
4. remove /home if at a separate mountpoint, from
the fstab -- no reason to risk the data
I may be introducing another layer of complication here but I have found
various OS Virtualization tools such OpenVZ extremely handy for for
migrating / updating servers with legacy RH operating systems.
Basically we have had a spare server where we have loaded the latest
Centos OS and installed the openvz kernel and utilities (all in RPM
format) and reboot.
All we have to do then is copy/backup the legacy RH9 server into a the
new openvz node (typically into /vz/private/<veid)). Basically rsync /
/home /var /usr etc (you don't need /boot or /lib/modules as you won't
be running the RH9 kernel) . Then create a ve conf file for the RH9 VPS
and then boot the RH9 VPS (easier if your VPS hardware node is on the
same IP subnet).
With your virtualised RH9 "server" running in VPS you are free to
reformat or re-install the original server. If when you have
re-installed the server and copied over the data, you find something is
broken, just fall back to your VPS "copy."
You could even test an OS upgrade using yum from within a VE before you
carrying out an upgrade on a real server.
On this particular server we are running 5 OS's including RH9 under an
openvz test kernel (there is now a new version of this kernel ;o)) :
[root@vm5 config]# cat /etc/redhat-release
CentOS release 4.3 (Final)
[root@vm5 ~]# uname -a
Linux vm5.xxxxxx.com 2.6.16-026test014.4-smp #1 SMP Wed Jun 7 17:01:29
MSD 2006 i686 i686 i386 GNU/Linux
[root@vm5 ~]# vzlist
VPSID NPROC STATUS IP_ADDR HOSTNAME
6001 35 running 83.xxxxxxxxxx secure1.xxxxx <--RH9
6002 58 running 83.xxxxxxxxxx server1.xxxxx <--Centos3
6003 1 running 83.xxxxxxxxxx test-gentoo.xxxx<--Gentoo
6004 49 running 83.xxxxxxxxxx server1.xxxx <--RH9
6006 26 running 83.xxxxxxxxxx status.xxxx <--FC6
Also has the advantage that we were able to run 10 or more (legacy) VPS
on the same physical hardware freeing up lots of real boxes (depends on
how busy the servers are and the power of the hardware node).
The only thing is I have not been able to create pristine RH9 template
using yum (but then again I don't need to as I just copy legacy boxes).
When FC6 came out this week it was a doddle to create an FC6 template
and boot an FC6 VPS.
There are other virtualisation technologies such as xen and vserver and
openvps etc which would help ease migration paths - all you need have is
one spare server, but I have jut found openvz the easiest to configure
and setup.
www.openvz.org
Regards
Paul Lee
Weycrest.Net
--
fedora-legacy-list mailing list
fedora-legacy-list@xxxxxxxxxx
https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-legacy-list
