Comment by quantumfissure | Hacker News Reader

Comment by quantumfissure | Hacker News Reader

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I'm always amazed and envious at how many successes people have had with the conversions.

This has been a huge problem for me and I only have just about 75 boxes. Only about 15 or so have been converted successfully to RHEL 7.9 since March, none (successfully) to 8.x after that.

1. Convert2rhel has been a nightmare, only a few have worked properly the first time. I've had 8 tickets opened with Redhat. Once I get one working, the next one will fail with different problems.

2. LEAPP from 7.9 to 8.9 hasn't worked successfully yet. When it does it breaks absolutely everything from PHP to mail sending to databases.

3. I thought Alma might solve the problem, nope. Similar issues as point number 2. Or I get Python errors, or any variety of anything else.

I'm not sure what our path is going to be (maybe Tuxcare or Suse or something), but I'm concerned about my job now since I was in charge of this and it's been a disaster. The anxiety is high.

>but I'm concerned about my job now since I was in charge of this and it's been a disaster.

Your boss should understand this, if you are a medium sized company with highly configured boxes (pet style) and have to change major versions, crazy stuff always happens, I can tell you story's (especially firmware and blob related but also cronjobs, "optimized"-shell scripts, to really old php stuff and so on) about upgrades that will drive you to the church before you touch any "dnf upgrade", however that's why i tend for much shorter upgrade times (within 3-5 years).

Customer had highly customized RHEL7 boxes, upgrade to 8 was "terror inducing", and went so far to rebuild nearly the whole infra (about 20 boxes but with really excellent documentation). You are not alone.

Is the problem ultimately to do with your configurations on your centos 7 boxes? Converting to rhel should be easy if you aren't doing anything that red hat wouldn't support in rhel.

Yeah, I thought so too (since they're only moving from COS signed to RH signed), but it's hard to describe. I've had everything from proxy issues; to python; to PHP-fpm breaking after the upgrade. It's just a constant flood of 1 step forward 3 back. Some from random gremlins. For example, last week I wanted to try a test conversion of a box to Alma linux and it worked fine, but broke PHP, so I had to revert the snapshot.

This week, the analysis blows up completely, despite nothing changing on the box. And that's just dev systems, I have zero confidence to move any prod systems.

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