Hi,

I have a Fedora Core 6 server and need to migrate the distribution to Centos but without loosing any configuration because I don't have all the information regarding all the application installed on this server.

Does anyone knows of a procedure for this migration?

Or is it really not recommended to do so ?

Thanks.

Eric

i suggest you consult the list of installed applications on your server, then dump all the config files for them.

if you do this you will be in for a long and painful, excruciatingly painful slog at reconfiguring EVERYTHING

i personally would question as to whether the advantage of using centos is worth the hastle of migrating

this is a big goal you're setting yourself

Thanks for the reply, I'll take it under consideration.

excuse my curiosity, but what gains do you achieve by moving to centos over fedora core 6?

FC6 has had no security updates in a couple of years. Centos has current updates and will continue to receive them until 2012(?). Centos has FF 3 in the repos, FC6 does not and will not(same goes for many packages). However, since Centos/RHEL5 was based on FC6 the migration process will be greatly simplified. The vast majority of your config files will just be a matter of swapping them in. As was said above back everything up first. After that I would do a clean install, install all your packages, and then swap in your backed up config files. For those packages you cannot find in one of the regular Centos repos you can usually do a direct install with FC6, you can also do this with rpms built for newer systems (F8 is probably the limit) but the further you get from FC6 the less likely they are to work without issue. The rpmforge has a lot of packages for el5 and atrpms is considered safe to use with other repos(unlike the issues with it on Fedora). For el5 livna/rpmfusion is basically useless, there are very few packages they support on el5.

Keep in mind that for the most part RHEL/Centos will not change the major revisions of most packages, but they do back patch those packages to be the equivalent (roughly) of current packages. An easy example of this is the kernel. RHEL/Centos5.X has a 2.6.18 based kernel and will have for its entire life cycle. However the current kernel (2.6.18-128.4.1.el5) is probably much closer to a vanilla .26 kernel than it is to a vanilla .18 kernel. Many of the packages on the system will follow a similar path.

perhapse you should consider migrating distro by distro from fc6 to f10 by updating your repo's and updating, there are some tutorials on the net as to how to do this, however it is not recommended by fedora's developers, also you should consider going over to ubuntu if you plan to change code base, they maintain security updates up til 4 years after release and actively support distro upgrades.

Upgrading FC6 via yum is particularly troublesome. Fedora 7 and later versions dropped the hdX drive designations for pata. They use the sdX designations for both pata and sata (most distros will eventually go this way, with time frame probably in years). But FC6 still uses the hdX designations. In a very high percentage of attempts the system gets lost when a drive goes from being called hda to sda and if you have a mixed sata/pata environment it gets further complicated becuase hda can(but not always, 50/50) become sda which moves sda to sdb. This is in addition to all the normal things that can (and often do) go wrong trying to use a yum update.

Hi All,

It's known than RHEL 5 (and CentOS 5) is based on Fedora [Core] 6, so i think that the migration will be relatively easy, but it depend on the kind of the server, you can use the list of the installed groups to get an idea about the server.

ok, my lack of knowledge in the red hat side of linux is my downfall here, i was under the impression that centos was a distro that had it's roots in a vanila kernel rather than a RHEL5 kernel, my mistake