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