Good morning
I have a number of physical servers in production; I performed a CENTOS8 → ROCKY8 conversion test, however at the end of the procedure I lost some configurations and there would still be a huge risk of various problems.
This is due to a complete reinstallation of packages (migrate2rocky.sh -r).
Is it possible to update only the repositories, and the essential packages, and then manually update the necessary ones?
Thanks
The migration tool is a script – editable script – isn’t it? Whether you can cut it short and still end up with usable system … I don’t know.
Many (but unfortunately not all) services in EL8 offer the “add your customizations into this directory” in addition to the older “modify this file that belongs to a package” style. The latter are subject to mangling on all reinstall/updates. Knowing this obviously does not help, if the configurations are already in vulnerable place. Neither does it help to know that there are configuration management systems designed to (re)deploy configurations into servers from management database/repository – building/adopting such database&workflow is a sizeable task too.
Still, if the conversion – full or partial – runs ashore (or any other earth-shattering event breaks a server), then one anyway has to reinstall from scratch / restore somehow. That is, you probably have some contingency/recovery plan for all situations?
Thus, it is down to cost analysis. The cost of editing the migration script to omit some steps and then manually resolve them vs the cost of changing the configs so that they do not break in full conversion vs the cost of fresh installs.
If you now reinstall some packages, but leave others be, then what will you do whenever updates are released for the packages that you don’t dare to touch?