[CentOS] Inquiry:Migration from Linux 7.2 to CentOS 5

[Les Mikesell]

John R Pierce wrote:
> 
>> Can you please do me favor and let me know what are the highlights of 
>> major benefits of CentOS Release 5 (Final) over the RedHat Linux 7.2 
>> (Enigma) as we are going to migrate to it
> 
> Benefits are in the eye of the beholder.
> 
> Red Hat Linux 7.x is about 8 years old, and has been a discontinued and 
> unsupported product for about 6 years, which means no security updates 
> or anything.  It also won't have any support for any new hardware since 
> it was disccontinued circa 2003.
> 
> CentOS 5, based on RHEL 5, is a current actively supported product.   
> Its built with a much newer kernel, newer versions of all the major 
> components (GCC, glibc, apache, php, python, mysql, postgres, X windows, 
> gnomee, kde, lvm, md-raid, etc etc etc.

If 7.x is running as a server, you can probably replace it with CentOS 5 with 
all the same services and not notice the difference. The CIPE vpn is the only 
thing I can think of that has been dropped and if you use imap you'll have to 
switch to dovecot.  There are many new features, but assuming that not needing 
them is the reason you haven't upgraded sooner, the real reason to move to 
CentOS is that there are regular updates for security and bugfixes that are well 
tested to not break existing behavior.   If you haven't updated since the 
pre-RHEL days, this may come as a shock, but within the long lifespan of a major 
RHEL/CentOS release you can 'yum update' (and reboot if you get a new kernel or 
library set) and everything just keeps working the same as before or better.

One thing to watch out for is that if you have more than one network interface, 
there's a fair change that the 2.6 kernel will detect them in a new order.  If 
you configure them with the GUI interface the hardware MAC address will be 
picked up in the configs to keep them from changing again.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com