Migrating to CentOS 7 Tonight

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svet-am

Supreme [H]ardness
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Jan 6, 2003
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My CentOS 6 box has had a good run (right now on 6.5 with the latest patches) but many packes (eg, glibc and glib) are too far out of date for some of the services I need to run.

I'll be upgrading to CentOS 7 tonight.

I'm not planning on much sleep.
 
Good god neither will I. (Referring to no sleep)

I totally missed any release information regarding CentOS 7. I remember seeing that in late June they were talking about 7, but didn't have a date of release.
 
MrGuvernment said:
why not just use remi repository if you need more up to date packages?
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remi?? ::shudders:: :eek:

you're new 'round here around here, aren't you? that's a one-way ticket to (a) kernel breakage, (b) package dependency hell or (c) both.
 
so, that was all actually surprisingly less painful than I expected. I was able to get my big services up and running quickly:

1) SubSonic
2) Apache (w/ SSL)
3) MySQL (MariaDB now)
4) OwnCloud (w/ SSL)
5) SaMBa
6) VNC w/ XFCE

I consider that a HUGE win. Later on I think I'll work on getting MythTV up and running but it's not a priority right now.
 
I've read that at some point there is going to be a tool released for upgrading existing 6.5 installs to 7.

My internet facing web/VM server is kind of in need of a rebuild. Unsure if I want to go with CentOS 7, or Ubuntu 14.04.
 
ZFS on Linux just released their first packages for CentOS 7. I'll probably migrate soon as well. Glad to hear you got everything up and running quick.
 
svet-am said:
remi?? ::shudders:: :eek:

you're new 'round here around here, aren't you? that's a one-way ticket to (a) kernel breakage, (b) package dependency hell or (c) both.
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been using remi for years with out any problems as such, but i also put in remi at the start after a yum update then run remi yum update then install my packages.

mind you i have only used it for php and modules and mysql. I guess I don't install anything else major enough to break...yet...
 
MrGuvernment said:
been using remi for years with out any problems as such, but i also put in remi at the start after a yum update then run remi yum update then install my packages.

mind you i have only used it for php and modules and mysql. I guess I don't install anything else major enough to break...yet...
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My honest opinion is that you've been lucky. I swear that sometimes just *enabling* remi is enough to break the kernel. I will use their repoview from time to time to download a single RPM if I know *exactly* how I'm going to use it but I rarely use it with YUM.

On the topic of repos, I think I'm missing something simple (but stupid). I am not seeing *any* repos with 32-bit libs for CentOS 7. I am seeing most have updates for x86_64 but not for 32-bit. Is this a change in this release? I need to upgrade libcurl to a newer version for a 32-bit package I have but I don't feel like building from source. I looked on the libcurl homepage for an RPM but even they only have 32-bit prebuilt RPMs.
 
svet-am said:
My honest opinion is that you've been lucky. I swear that sometimes just *enabling* remi is enough to break the kernel. I will use their repoview from time to time to download a single RPM if I know *exactly* how I'm going to use it but I rarely use it with YUM.

On the topic of repos, I think I'm missing something simple (but stupid). I am not seeing *any* repos with 32-bit libs for CentOS 7. I am seeing most have updates for x86_64 but not for 32-bit. Is this a change in this release? I need to upgrade libcurl to a newer version for a 32-bit package I have but I don't feel like building from source. I looked on the libcurl homepage for an RPM but even they only have 32-bit prebuilt RPMs.
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There is no x86 CentOS 7 yet. The only supported arch is x86_64.

Support for a x86 build will be added later along with PowerPC and ARM.
 
devman said:
There is no x86 CentOS 7 yet. The only supported arch is x86_64.

Support for a x86 build will be added later along with PowerPC and ARM.
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Okay, so I somehow missed this. Now I feel like a doofus
 
I may be putting in some CentOS7 this week to see how they run and if well will migrate over my new web servers which i literally just set up 3 weeks ago..
 
Mine has been generally pretty stable and robust since I got it set up. I am still figuring out all of the nuances of how systemd works as it is affecting some of my process management. Other than that, it was almost literally a "backup the confs, install the new OS, restore the confs" type of operation.
 
How do desktop fonts look in RHEL 7 compred to RHEL 6? Are they smaller? I found the fonts in RHEL 6 to be perfect.
 
I'm not normally in a GUI as I run services on the machine that I administer via SSH.

For the rare times when I do have a GUI, I'm in VNC with minimal font support.
 
Wow did not know they were at 7, good to know. Next system I setup I'll try it out. None of my stuff is redundant/failover/cluster so can't update something that's active unfortunately. I need to look into setting myself in a way that I can so I can stay more up to date. Heck, my main server is still running FC9. LOL. I'm working on migrating a lot of that stuff into VMs on my new VM host though.
 
I scored a good deal on a dedicated server that is better and cheaper than my current one for all my web stuff. going to start migrating stuff soon.

My biggest concern is email as that can be tricky to get working, anything special thing I need to know about migrating postfix/dovecot from CentOS 5 to 7? Or should the old configs mostly all work? Obviously not going to overwrite the main config but I'm talking more about the mailbox definitions like the "virtual" file and such as well as the passwd file for the pop3 mailboxes and other files of that nature.
 
I migrAted back to centos 6.5 a few days ago. Systems is an abomination and half of my services would inexplicably die and systemd gives no way of reliably debugging or validating that init/cron scripts are running as expected -- especially when several are chained together.

Things are back to normal on centos 6.5
 
Hmmm that's not reassuring. I did notice they changed the way init scripts work and it's kind of weird.

But if services just randomly fail that's not cool. Is this a known issue? I'll have to read up more before I put too much work towards this migration.
 
Going forward I will be avoiding systemd like the plague. I have loved centos in the past but I am seriously considering giving arch Linux or gentoo a look. He'll I'd even like/prefer canonical's upstart system compared to systemd. Regardless, if a distro uses systemd, I will be passing it by.
 
svet-am said:
Going forward I will be avoiding systemd like the plague. I have loved centos in the past but I am seriously considering giving arch Linux or gentoo a look. He'll I'd even like/prefer canonical's upstart system compared to systemd. Regardless, if a distro uses systemd, I will be passing it by.
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Arch Linux switched to systemd over a year ago, Ubuntu is also switching to systemd. If you want to avoid systemd, Slackware or Gentoo are quickly becoming the only major distros that don't use it.

That being said, I've been using Arch Linux a long time, and the systemd switch last year was met with a large amount of criticism on the arch forums. After trying it, and being confused for while, I can see why they switched though. Being able to use unit-files from upstream projects saves package maintainers a pile of time they used to spend tweaking initscripts, and honestly init being declarative has been a long time coming.
 
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I find most distros now are going to systemd or other things that are simply an extra layer of complexity for nothing. Then there's stuff like networkmanager for example, that seems to have plagued most distros, and it just makes things harder because it overwrites the config files that you'd normally use to make the changes permanent. It's fine for a desktop where you are using the GUI but for a server you still want to be able to edit config files.

With that said, my brand new centos 7 server started to hiccup overnight and I did not even do much to it other than install postfix and other basic programs. So think I may do the same and go back to 6.5. I already have a few home servers running 6.x anyway so at least I'll be staying on familiar ground.
 
I had massive problems porting over my CentOS 6.5 laptop to 7 as well. Well to the point that I actually could not get it to work.

I should point the people who keep on rambling about how Linux is more intuitive and easy to use than windows, to this thread.

Yes I know it is a distro issue and CentOS is not the most friendly of them all...
 
I find migrating to any distro is always a pain. Going from CentOS 5 to 6.5 and while 6.5 is more tame than 7, they still went and changed everything. Named acts really weird, it creates all these weird file mounts that it sometimes fails to mount/unmount. If you make a syntax error in your config and try to restart it DELETES all the config... all the zones, everything. So have to always have a backup handy. Thankfully it seems to keep one in the non chroot folder but I don't really trust that.

Then there's dovecot/postfix, I did not get to deep into that yet but they completely changed the configs.

It would be nice if they would leave config files alone so that I can just drop in configs/databases from the old box but that would be too easy. Going to be a pain if I need to rebuild all the virtual mailboxes by hand.

Apache is the only thing that seems to stay fairly concistent. I just added an include line to the config file to include my vhosts and it seems to work fine. At least when I telnet in, as I did not actually change DNS to new server yet.

Problem with Linux is lack of consistency between distros. I can't imagine having to manage lot of Linux servers. They're all islands, there's no way to centrally manage them properly.
 
Did some clean CentOS 7 web servers over the last 2 weeks and so far no issues *knock hard on wood* with nginx and php-fpm and some Percona MySQL boxes.
 
Andyk5 said:
I had massive problems porting over my CentOS 6.5 laptop to 7 as well. Well to the point that I actually could not get it to work.

I should point the people who keep on rambling about how Linux is more intuitive and easy to use than windows, to this thread.

Yes I know it is a distro issue and CentOS is not the most friendly of them all...
Click to expand...

Linux isn't an OS so anyone rambling about Linux vs Windows anything isn't really making a testable claim. Now if someone said that RHEL/CentOS wasn't as easy to use as Windows 7 I'd probably agree with them, but RHEL's major target is servers.
 
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