[CentOS] Upgrading FC2 to CentOS 5.* - anyone second this?

Wed May 30 15:28:40 UTC 2012
Les Mikesell <lesmikesell at gmail.com>

On Wed, May 30, 2012 at 10:04 AM, Max Pyziur <pyz at brama.com> wrote:
>>
> The point is to leave configurations, partitions, and other components as
> close as possible to being intact.

Why isn't the point to match the existing CentOS box in production
closely instead?

> Since this is a server environment,
> there are about 700-800 packages, not the 3000 that sit on desktop
> machine.

If it is a server environment, you should be paying attention to the
supported life of the distribution.  FC2 is long, long past its 'use
by' date.

> Make lists of rpms on the FC2 install, and then sdiff'ing with
> the list of rpms installed from the CentOS upgrade should be one way of
> identifying non-CentOS packages and/or duplications.

Just get the package list from the working C5 box and feed it to
kickstart or to yum after a minimal install.

> Last, CentOS is built from Fedora Core 6. Usually, it makes sense to
> proceed sequentially.

No,  it makes sense to upgrade things that were designed and tested as
upgrades, and to re-install things that weren't.  You might, with a
lot of work and care, make the upgrade operational, but the result
will be a one-of-a-kind beast that doesn't belong in a production
environment.

> But how much difference is there from FC2 to
> FC6/CentOS 5.*?

The point is that nobody knows, and there's no reason for anyone to
know.  You weren't supposed to run things that long on Fedora.   But
if you are going to let things go that long again with no maintenance,
I'd recommend jumping all the way to C6 even if it is more work now,
so  'yum update' will take care of it for years.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
     lesmikesell at gmail.com