How to move from OLD system Fedora Core 2.5 to New RHEL system
 

Hi all, new here.

I have an old P4 system with IDE hard drive running a old version of Fedora Core.

I am looking to migrate this to a new system, one with SATA drives and i5 processor, so it can be supported for a couple of years yet.

The problem is the old system has a bespoke PCI card and loads drivers / software as part of the boot-in process. So the old system just used to sit at login with everything working in the background (No need to login).

Question is, how can I move all the important driver / software / services from the old system to the new one? How do I identify the locations of software / drivers loaded automatically at boot-up?

Hopefully this makes some sense to someone? Thanks

You don't; load the new version of Linux, and it should recognize the device, unless it's VERY old/obscure. And if that's the case, you can either get a new card (you don't say what this 'bespoke PCI card' actually does/is) that does what the old one does, or bide your time until the entire old system dies, and you're FORCED to upgrade.

You also don't say what software/services you have on the old machine, so we can't really tell you how to migrate them. Some of the services may be able to use their old config files...some may not. The best thing to do is to build the new system beside the old one, and rather than focusing on 'how can I migrate to the new box', identify what the old box DOES, and move forward.

For example, if you're using FTP and Telnet on the old box...it'd be a REALLY good thing to go to SFTP and SSH instead. Older protocols like those are insecure...and migration/build time is a perfect time to get things secured, updated, and ready to go for several years to come. Identify what services are on the old box, and configure the new one as needed. Don't copy files/drivers over, since that'll make things harder. Test as you go.

The PCI card and software associated is very unique, off the shelf replacement is not an option.

Ideally I am trying to identify what the old box is doing, I know that it is installing the driver because I can see it loading as part of the pre-login process, I have no idea where this driver is stored or being 'called' from, is there a start-up script somewhere on the old box I can interrogate. It will not be a driver that the new Red Hat box will recognise.

The old box runs three bits of software, two run irrelevant of whether the card is in or not, they of course don't function correctly, but the point I am making is the third piece of software that is loaded only loads when the driver and applications are running OK. I call them software, but they could be services? Although on the old box they are referred to as file type executables (small grey cog icon), as I mentioned already these load in the background at boot-up without anyone needing to login in.

Another bit of Windows software connects to the Linux box on a IP address and port number to extract the data stream output by the software and card as described above.

Without knowing anything about your card I would say moving to a newer system may not be possible.

FC 2 ran a 2.6.5 kernel. My advice would be to try it on a CentOS 6 32 bit OS. It is still uses a 2.6.x kernel and old but CentOS will be supported for about another year. Not quite ideal but better then nothing.

If the PCI card is very unique then it is possible the device is not supported in newer kernels and your applications will not run. Do you have the source code?

Current systems running udev will automatically load the necessary modules but you can have them automatically load via /etc/modprobe.d or even rc.local. It is possible that some service is being started using an init script but since it is a unique device it is impossible for us to identify them for you.

udev will only load things it knows about - I'm guessing a custom card would have to be a service. First place to look would be the boot logs - then /etc/init.d (hope that's correct, been a long time ...)
"chkconfig" will list all the services known - might be easier to check that.

Finding the service(s) and module(s) is probably less than half the problem. It's likely it will rely on specific system components that are no longer supported, or are only available at a higher version. Welcome to the world of proprietary code and all that it entails ...
Hopefully it was shipped as a rpm or a script you can interrogate.

And can you tell us what this card is/does, and what this software is???? Without knowing details, we aren't going to be able to help much.
How do you know? How was it installed initially?
We have no idea, since you are STILL not telling us anything besides "software" and "PCI card". We can't guess. It could very well be that this mystery card is well-supported at this point by RHEL. And it's also very possible that the card is not even MADE any longer, and is totally unsupported....leaving you with the sole option of replacing it.

You say you can't replace it, but be realistic; no piece of hardware lasts forever, and at some point it *WILL* die. And you will then HAVE TO find a replacement or option. And we're trying to help you work through such things now, but we can't unless you give us any details.

I sense that the system in question is restricted access, perhaps military. How can anyone here tell you whether a mystery pci card will work with its mystery driver, on a new system?

I can tell you that you'll probably need to stick with the 2.6 kernel, whatever you choose to do. Someone previously mentioned driver sources. If you had that, it might prove beneficial to getting the driver to work with a different kernel.

Everything else is too general and vague to comment on.