I am new to Rocky Linux having ported my old Centos System using the Centos to Rocky script. I am currently running release 8.10 (Green Obsidian). I noticed that Rocky is up to 9.4 … Can I (should I) do an in place upgrade and avoid a fresh install. Or should I wait. Thanks for the advice and experience doing this.
If 8.10 is working for you, then you are free to stay there until 2029 when it goes end of life. I have a few 8.10 boxes left myself, for example and I have no plans to migrate them or move them at this time.
If you wish to go to 9.4, you’ll need to do a clean install as upgrades are not supported.
See our upgrade policy for more information.
I just read the upgrade policy (thanks for this!) and it gave me a great summary of the path (which I was unaware).
I use Samba, (for remote access from a Windows desktop) and other layout customization. Will I have to reinstall (rebuild) these if I do a fresh install? From your experience, what is the main benefit of 9.4 over 8.1 that could justify the hassle of a fresh install? Otherwise waiting for an upgrade (in place) tool might be best in a few years time.
If you are using samba for file sharing (I am assuming this is what you mean), the configuration should be pretty close to the same between what’s there in Rocky Linux 8 and 9. There may be a few quirks (as there are between major versions). I honestly don’t know the quirks yet, I’ve not even moved my 8.10 samba server over to 9 just yet. Stands to reason there will be something that’ll pop up on us.
For myself, using Rocky Linux 9 gives me (and others) access to newer features or new package sets for a few years. That’ll be the same when we release 10 in May. So we’ll see the likes of samba, sssd, IPA, other things get version upgrades. Some prefer to just keep things the way they are until the very end, which is also ok, as long as you have some sort of initial plan on how to move on to something new.
I think the only way to really justify a migration to a new version for your case would be to ask:
- is there a feature that I need?
- is there a minor bug affecting me that is fixed in 9.X and won’t be fixed in 8.10?
- is the age of the software on my server making it difficult for my desktop/others from accessing it?
In the end, you do have to technically “rebuild” what you have, but the pain of going through can be lessened.
What I’ve traditionally have done is setup a VM on the side somewhere and tried to “emulate” what I have on my old box and get the configuration as close as possible. I do this so that way I can iron out the new quirks and iron out potential issues ahead of time. That makes it easier for me when I have limited resources.
I hope that sort of makes sense.
As for an in-place upgrade tool, there is “elevate” and some have expressed success with it. As always, YMMV. We do encourage folks out there to maybe help run a special interest group that pushes forth a configuration or work with the elevate folks to make it better and/or less of an unknown, and break down some barriers in that regard for in-place upgrades.
These distros have also Ansible and Red Hat has RHEL documentation about how to configure/manage your (RHEL) system with it. (There are System Roles.)
In ideal case you would have one description of what you want to have in the system and Ansible would translate that to actual, appropriate config regardless of whether you have Rocky 8, 9, 10, or Debian. In practice there is usually some tweaks to do or add to better target a new distro, but you can easily keep both versions.
I did start to use Ansible while I still had CentOS 7, and did eventually reinstall several systems “from scratch” (for unrelated reasons), because the install&config became so easy.
Naturally, if a system contains user data, then its preservation or transfer is beyond the install&config&manage.
In the VM one can not only iron out quirks, but also study what “new ways” the new distro has to offer.
Thank you so much for this!
I use two Rocky servers to host media databases (music, images, Plexserver, Emby, etc.) as well some modeling work (differential equations) and most important, backup of my other desktops on a local network. It has saved my butt more times than I can count. Moving from Centos to Rocky (in place) was fantastic. The conversion script just worked and I did not have to do a thing to recreate my environment (especially Samba) and desktop (as used via remote desktop from Windows). Hopefully something like that will emerge for upgrading Rocky releases.