I have a friend who has been having an intermittent problem with his nice, shiny new IBM x226 server. It's a Xeon processor, 1.5Gb RAM, hardware RAID controller running CentOS 3
The system will will sometimes run for a couple of weeks, then simply lock up -- nothing on the console, no response to pings, no "caps-lock" lights, no kernel panic indicators, nothing in the logs to indicate the problem. Other times the machine may lock up three times in one day. At the last call to me he did report that the hard drive lights flicker every once in a while during one of the systems catatonic states, but other than that there was no indication of life.
We have been in contact with IBM servicce and have run their hardware tests, which perform flawlessly. We have now come to the point where they claim that "CentOS is not a supported OS" and even though they acknowledge CentOS as a RHEL clone, they argue that there is no support path for them to follow to pursue possible software problems.
The system owner is ready to buy RHEL, just to get service on his machine, but I am wondering -- how difficult is it to convert from CentOS to RHEL? Is it similar to the conversion from RHEL to CentOS or from WBEL to CentOS? I would like to avoid a complete reload.
Does anyone else have any suggestions?
TIA,
Barry