[LON-CAPA-admin] Fedora to CentOS?

[Mark Lucas]

Paul,

I went to Centos 5 last summer here at Ohio University. I always go the
route of keeping home intact and wiping the system. I keep a backup
of /etc to help in reconfiguring.

The Centos 5 instructions are nearly identical to the RedHat Enterprise
instructions with the exception of the yum.conf if I remember right.
Someone else may be able to respond to that (it's been a half year since
the installs and I'm not sure what might have changed on the LON-CAPA
install end).

As for the DVD issue, I just got done updating my desktop to FC8, but
don't have a DVD burner. I downloaded the minimal installer onto CD (it
can also use a memory stick) and then installed using http:. Once I
figured out exactly what path to provide for the http: it went very
smoothly.

Hope this helps,
Mark


On Wed, 2008-01-02 at 09:13 -0500, Neubauer, Paul R. wrote:
> Here's a question that probably doesn't come up very often, but has
> anyone "sidegraded" from Fedora to Centos? Has anyone changed linux
> distros in any other direction? Centos seems like a natural change of
> distros, but I'm open to other suggestions too.
>  
> Background: We're still running FC4 on an HP DL380 G3. I know that's
> suboptimal, but we have very few opportunities to upgrade and our
> window last summer was occupied with other tasks. :-( 
>  
> LON-CAPA 2.5.3, the current version, deprecates FC4, but 2.6, the
> soon-to-be-released version, does not even mention FC4, so it looks
> like we want to upgrade the OS before 2.6.
>  
> On a previous occasion, I had tried and failed to install FC5. It
> turns out that FC5 (I don't know about 6, 7 or 8) does not correctly
> detect or handle the hardware RAID array on these Proliant servers.
> (http://www.broadbandpig.com/archives/2006/05/fedora_core_5_o.html discusses that problem.) Of course, by the time I discovered the problem, I had no time to track it down and fix it because the next semester was about to begin. That left us on FC4 when FC5 was current, which was not too bad, but it gets worse. Now the latest versions of Fedora seem to be available as a DVD ISO, but no longer as multiple ISOs for CDs. Unfortunately the DL380 has a CD drive, not a DVD drive. The result is that between the RAID problem and the CD problem, I am not sure how to go about updating from FC4 to Fedora 8 (or more likely 9 by the time we get a window of opportunity to do it). I doubt that I'm going to get funding to replace the CD drive with a DVD drive and, personally, I don't feel like messing about with the hardware any more than necessary.
>  
> I see that Centos does still come as multiple CD ISOs and is,
> obviously, intended for use as an "Enterprise" platform. It also
> appears to support the hardware RAID arrays of the Proliant series.
>  
> So, the big question is what I would need to do to "upgrade" to
> Centos. I would GUESS that the instructions
> on http://www.lon-capa.org/fedoracoreupdate.html may be comparable to
> what I would need for "sidegrading" from Fedora to Centos, but I'm not
> too sure. What I have done in the past for upgrading Fedora is
> essentially to wipe out the OS but leave /home untouched and just
> reinstall the new OS onto /, /usr and /var. 
>  
> I could go that route or pretend I was moving to FC6 (just with Centos
> CDs) or ...
>  
> I may be able to get some spare hardware for a short time to test
> install FC4 and then install Centos over that, but I'm not sure yet.
>  
> Anybody have any good advice for me?
>  
> Thanks,
> Paul
>