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Upgrading Mandriva 2009.0 to CentOS 5.2

Well, technically speaking, I guess this is a bit of a downgrade. But, since I’m not longer using Mandriva and need to get used to Red Hat products (Fedora, RHEL, etc.), CentOS makes sense for upgrading my internal server to. It was also a long week, so I goofed a bit on it (I did backups of mysql and ldap, but didn’t do dumps of the data which I only realized after the fact… could have been very very bad).

Anyways, the system is a quad core 2 duo system with 8GB RAM. CentOS refused to boot at first until I specified “linux acpi=off”. Downside there is it only got me the use of one core rather than the four. That was later fixed using “pci=nommconf”, which allowed the kernel to boot and got me all four cores.

The install went well. Seems like a lot less to select, and therefore tweak, than the Mandriva installers I’m used to. But it wasn’t bad. Nice thing was it picked up and auto-assembled all my mdadm RAID1 arrays, so I could format those that needed it and left the others alone. Unfortunately, it didn’t fully associate them… after the install when I booted they were in a degraded state so I had to hot-add the second partition for each one.

The real kicker is the placement of files. There are a few places where Mandriva and CentOS differ, like where the named chroot is, so that took some monkeying around with. I also had SELinux in enforcing mode at first, but it didn’t really like the fact that I was using /srv/www/[domain] instead of /var/www/html for serving up web content, and it didn’t like the vhost.d/*.conf bit in httpd.conf so Apache was pretty broken until I disabled SELinux. I’ve never actually used SELinux before, so now I have to learn how to set policies and targets and all that other goodness.

One of the first steps was setting up the rpmforge yum repository. Too much of CentOS is just too dated for me. I need subversion 1.5 (comes with 1.4) and nagios 3.x (comes with 2.x). I was not going to change my nagios configs to suit the older version. rpmforge makes all of that pretty easy though. I did have to copy /var/lib/mysql over and other than changing the ownership of the files to match the new uid/gid for the mysql user, it all worked out great. I have not yet done the openldap setup though, so I’m not sure if I’ll be as lucky with that.

There are still quite a few configuration tweaks to make. It also didn’t help that I had to reset my network from a 10.10 network to a 192.168 network. I’m sure that may still bite me a bit.

Other than that, it all seems to have worked out ok. I was asked why I didn’t just use Fedora for this and while Fedora may be stable enough, I don’t want to have to upgrade every year. That makes CentOS compelling. All this machine does is run nagios to monitor other sites, provide DHCP and DNS services, LDAP for authentication for my virtual machines, web/mysql serving, and does automatic backups of other systems in the LAN. The reason I upgraded from Corporate Server 4.0 to 2009.0 in the first place was the idea that CS5 was going to be based on 2009.0 (so I was getting a jump on things). Time will tell how it goes, but I think it should be ok. Last month I deployed 4 CentOS boxes for a client, with one more left to do, so I’m starting to get a little used to it and yum. =) The SELinux thing may be a bit more work to get used to (I’ve used RSBAC and AppArmor, but never really played with SELinux).

Then tomorrow I’m upgrading a laptop to Fedora 11. That should be interesting. =)

15 Comments
Feb 6, 2009
By vdanen Red Hat Tags: ,

15 Comments

  1. David Dreggors

    I can appreciate your pains in the changes. I have been using Mandriva since 2000 (7.0) as my primary OS at home. At the office and in the data center I am the admin for a couple of hundred servers. Most were RHEL3 when I started working for the company, since then we have upgraded to RHEL4, RHEL5, and now CentOS 5.2.

    I am very happy with CentOS, given it is the exact same OS as RHEL5 but no up2date/rhn license and setup up to worry with.

    However I find myself typing “urpmi ” at work and “yum install ” at home lol.

    Have fun with CentOS, once you get used to the “minor” differences… you will enjoy using it.

    Feb 06, 2009 @ 21:29:04

  2. Rahul Sundaram

    You might want to use EPEL + RPM Fusion for EL repositories as a combination which has more packages and integrates well.

    For Fedora upgrades, try preupgrade.

    Also, why aren’t you in Planet Fedora?

    http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Planet

    Feb 07, 2009 @ 06:32:36

  3. vdanen

    David: well, I won’t be using Mandriva anymore (there isn’t much point), so I’ll slowly be forgetting about urpmi… I’ve already gotten used to yum to the point that I’m not mis-typing it, just need to learn all the little tricks that go with it.

    Rahul: Yeah, I found EPEL and RPM Fusion. RPM Fusion has really helped… that got me the newer nagios and subversion. Definitely a good repo to have alongside stuff.

    For Planet Fedora, I signed up but can’t seem to get into the ssh account to set it up. =( I tried that a few days ago tho, maybe I should try logging in there again. Nope. Just tried. Still doesn’t work. Maybe I need to be in more than just the Fedora and Red Hat CLA groups or something. I’ll see if I can’t get that going today.

    Feb 07, 2009 @ 08:59:43

  4. Adam Williamson

    vdanen: you’ll also want RPM Fusion for your desktop installs, as that’s where lots of useful non-free stuff that we’re used to having around lives :)

    And yes, you need to be added to a group other than the default ones before ssh will work. Actually, the Wiki stage should probably say that specifically, since it’s caught both you and me out. Get someone to add you to some other group, wait an hour, then it should work.

    Feb 07, 2009 @ 13:00:28

  5. vdanen

    Yeah, I signed up for the fedora security group but I suspect Josh isn’t around to approve it. =) There’s so many groups in there, I didn’t want to randomly pick one just for the heck of it, so I figured I’d start with the security group.

    And yes, I’ve got RPM Fusion setup in CentOS and will be dual-booting RHEL and Fedora on my laptop. RHEL works good, but a few things are bothering me and I just did a live CD boot of F10 on there and the big thing (scroll wheel not working on my bluetooth mouse) is fixed. But I’m nervous of blowing away the RHEL setup I’ve configured, so I’m going to dual-boot until I’m comfortable enough that everything that needs to work is working. =)

    Feb 07, 2009 @ 13:42:07

  6. Rahul Sundaram

    Sign up for the FedoraBugs group and I can approve you.

    Feb 07, 2009 @ 20:21:14

  7. Rahul Sundaram

    Adam,

    It is already noted

    “As a fedora contributor you have to have a Fedora Account System account, have signed the cla and be a member of at least one other group in FAS. “

    Feb 07, 2009 @ 20:23:44

  8. vdanen

    Rahul, I’ve signed up so am just waiting for the approval. Thanks!

    Feb 07, 2009 @ 20:25:21

  9. Stephen Smoogen

    Welcome to the Fedora &| CentOS world. The CentOS 5.3 updates should be out soon which should recognize your kernel without kernel parameters. While I am an EPEL champion, if you are looking for stuff that would conflict or is newer than what is in CentOS, RPMforge is probably better choice. In either case, it is best to choose one set of repos for a server as dealing with mysterious conflicts.

    Feb 08, 2009 @ 13:30:48

  10. vdanen

    Thanks for the welcome, Stephen! Yeah, I looked at EPEL and it looks pretty decent, but the “downgrade” of Mandriva 2009 to CentOS took away my PHP 5.2.x, lowered the apache version and the mysql version. So I added rpmforge and also the Utter Ramblings repository, to get the newer AMP stack. So far it seems to be working out quite well. =)

    Feb 08, 2009 @ 13:54:04

  11. Boycott Novell » IRC: #boycottnovell @ FreeNode: February 8th, 2009 - Part 1

    [...] That’s the current leader of Fedora. One other Mandriva hacker has just joined Red Hat and he’s moving to centos.. http://linsec.ca/blog/2009/02/06/upgradin… [...]

    Feb 09, 2009 @ 02:53:01

  12. Lucian

    The “Utter Ramblings” repo has been inactive for too many months now. I think the guy went to the honey moon and forgot to come back.
    Centos/RHEL 5.x needs a 3rd party AMP repo with newer stuff… When is RedHat gonna hire Oden Eriksson? :D

    Feb 09, 2009 @ 09:53:59

  13. vdanen

    heheh… well, Oden is busy doing what I was doing back at Mandriva. =)

    It looked like Utter Ramblings is pretty up-to-date for the PHP and Apache, and MySQL even I think. Unless I’m clueless and not paying attention to upstream version releases (which is entirely possible).

    Feb 09, 2009 @ 10:35:44

  14. Rahul Sundaram

    Approved. Sorry for the delay. Drop me a mail if you need any further help.

    Feb 09, 2009 @ 19:45:50

  15. vdanen

    Thanks, Rahul. My inclusion to fedora-security kicked in first so I’m on the planet feed now. =)

    Feb 09, 2009 @ 20:11:25

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