[CentOS] Re: Migration from RH9

James A. Peltier jpeltier at cs.sfu.ca
Thu Nov 22 17:55:45 UTC 2007


Ugo Bellavance wrote:
> James A. Peltier wrote:
>> Leonel Nunez wrote:
>>
>> I can second this.  I am in the process of migrating 5 research labs 
>> from Suse 10.0 to CentOS 5 (for various reasons).  The migration has 
>> been in testing phase for over 3 months and a lot of bugs have been 
>> found and corrected in that time.
>>
>> A migration from any OS to another is a very tedious and time 
>> consuming step.  You will need to work on each part of the migration 
>> individually.  Start with the services that you are most familiar with 
>> or that you feel you could learn the quickest.
>>
>> Setup a machine with CentOS 5 and begin testing that service.  When 
>> you are confident that said service is operating as it should, shift 
>> that service from the production server to your testing server.  Let 
>> it run there for a bit because chances are you'll find bugs and that 
>> will give you a chance to fail the service back over (if necessary) 
>> while you correct the issue.
>>
>> Once you've gotten all the services over to the new box you'll be 
>> happy to know you did it the "right way" and that you've incurred the 
>> least amount of pain for you, your fellow workers who work with you 
>> and your users.
>>
>> IMHO, you should spend a lot of time testing the Perforce migration, 
>> followed by your web services.  Migration of any SCM is a potentially 
>> complicated operation.  I haven't used Perforce before, but be careful.
>>
>> Secondly, careful testing of your web services is crucial.  You'll 
>> most likely be upgrading version of Apache, PHP and libraries at the 
>> same time which can break things like backward compatibility. Samba 
>> depending on it's function within your institution would be a close 
>> third, if not a tie for number 2, but that's up to you.
>>
>> The squid services are probably not all that complicated if they're 
>> only using a caching server (forward or reverse).
>>
>> Of course, with proper software unit testing and a bit of elbow grease 
>> I'm sure it will all go over well.
>>
>> There are various papers on best practices for OS migrations and 
>> various other system administrator task on the web just google for 
>> migration best practices and you'll find lots.
>>
> 
> Wow, excellent advice!
> 
> Thanks!
> 
> Ugo
> 
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I forgot to mention.  Document EVERYTHING!  It will often help you in 
times of frustration to ensure that you are not doing the same thing 
over and over and over again and coming up with the same results.  Not 
only that, but you'll be able to refer back to it in a case of system 
failure when you need to get the service up NOW. ;)

-- 
James A. Peltier
Technical Director, RHCE
SCIRF | GrUVi @ Simon Fraser University - Burnaby Campus
Phone   : 778-782-3610
Fax     : 778-782-3045
Mobile  : 778-840-6434
E-Mail  : jpeltier at cs.sfu.ca
Website : http://gruvi.cs.sfu.ca | http://scirf.cs.sfu.ca
MSN     : subatomic_spam at hotmail.com



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