I wonder if there are any plans to prepare a utility to upgrade RL8 to RL9 once the latter arrives in some future. Fore Debian-derived distros like Ubuntu the task of upgrade to next major version has always been pretty straightforward. So has it been for Fedora. Unfortunately, AFAIR, there was never such a possibility for RHEL/CentOS. I think it is an important flaw of RHEL-derived distros, probably causing many production servers to be kept running outdated versions. The idea of reinstalling everything from scratch may be a SysAdminās true nightmare.
1 Like
@msz1959 there was an upgrade procedure that appeared I think from RHEL7 to allow upgrading from RHEL6. There was a migration tool that made checks before the upgrade was made. So the fact that it was possible to do this for 6 ā 7 and 7 ā 8, then it will also be available most likely for 8 ā 9.
Results vary from these types of upgrades, and sometimes itās better to clean install even though the ability exists.
If you google you will find many articles with the procedure.
From the Centos Forum:
Re: CentOS 7 to CentOS 8 upgrade script
Post by TrevorH Ā» 2019/10/05 11:32:51
Please note that there is NO UPGRADE from CentOS 7 to 8. Any āupgradeā script here is entirely at your own risk and the resulting system, if it experiences any problems in future, will be completely unsupported.
Sure, there are some procedures/scripts available on the internet, but all third-party and, as mentioned above by an important CentOS person, unsupported. On the other hand, RHEL itself (contrary to what I thought) included procedures for RHEL 7->8 upgrade, so it should be, in principle, possible for Rocky as well. For serious installations (servers etc) something coming from the distro pages would be encouraging.
Hello @msz1959
when you install centos or rocky and if you read the license term you would notice it does not take any responsibility for any risk that that even for the new/fresh installation so i think that why the upgrade follow the same rule
@msz1959 nice to know.
I had used official RH documentation to upgrade from 6 ā 7 so these official documents do exist. Obviously without a subscription they arenāt accessible to anyone, hence in those cases the third-party ones do cover the steps required.
On checking, I see that the upgrade tool doesnāt exist in the repositories, but hopefully Rocky will cover this in the future maybe? Maybe the RHEL one is closed, and they didnāt opensource it and perhaps is the reason why it doesnāt exist for CentOS or others. I had assumed it existed, since RHEL had this ability 
If I remember correctly, (but I may be wrong) there was a tool from 6 ā 7 for CentOS. However, it didnāt work correctly. I donāt remember if it was at all official, taken from a RedHat tool, or what, but the bottom line was that it didnāt work.
I do remember seeing RH had a tool for 7 ā 8 but I donāt know its effectiveness either.
As was mentioned above, Debian and its ilk did have an easy to use path for upgrading and RedHat didnāt. These days, Fedora is usually a pretty easy upgrade, even with rpmfusion stuff installed, though sometimes, Iāve had to uninstall something and reinstall it after the ugrade. So, one can have hope that RH, and maybe afterwards, Rocky, Alma, and others will also have it. I think we all agree it would be nice.
TLDR; Not yet, maybe later, there are various signs of hope. (BTW, Hi, Trevor!) Good to see you here.
1 Like
The RH one I have used on a couple of servers. Was fine. Just surprised it didnāt trickle down for everyone to use. Had a mess with Ubuntu once using the do-release-upgrade when MariaDB was installed from the MariaDB repo. Was recoverable, but a nightmare. Since then I just stuck with what was in the Ubuntu repos than try to use something else external or if I have other external repos, to just use apt-get upgrade/dist-upgrade and manually cleanup than the do-release-upgrade tool. Linux Mint on the otherhand works far better than Ubuntu at least with my experience. Fedoraās upgrade is great, I hope that would move down to Rocky sometime in the future. We can hope
Has this question been answered?
For Debian-derived distros like Ubuntu the task of upgrade to next major version has always been pretty straightforward. So has it been for Fedora. Unfortunately, AFAIR, there was never such a possibility for RHEL/CentOS. I think it is an important flaw of RHEL-derived distros, probably causing many production servers to be kept running outdated versions.
This is still true, otherwise, and would be a shame.
The official and rational answer is: do not upgrade (in-place); install fresh.
RHEL and RHEL-derived distros can run almost a decade with one install. A lot does change in that time.
Do you really think that duct-tape on duct-tape is better than applying appropriate config on fresh setup?
That said, Red Hatās tool for RHEL, āleappā, (which does not work for all RHEL setups) together with data (mostly from Oracle) suitable for RHEL-derived distros makes āELevateā ā a tool that perhaps can upgrade in-place some systems. See AlmaLinux OS - ELevate Your Distribution
There might already be EL8 ā EL9 version, or at least it is in the works.
Personally, I rather install than try such things.
wait, is this a joke? So how it works flawlessly on Debian (as you say duck-tape on duck-tape), which is de-facto declared as the most stable distribution everā¦ or even better OpenSuse. I am using one server serving NIS and it works flawlessly after upgrade.
as far as I can see, this problem is only related to RedHat and CentOS derived RockyLinux.
Best regards
Iāve never used Debian or Suse. Perhaps they are (in convenient way) different from RHEL.
I used both in the past, and yes they are different from RHEL. The point is that it is doable and does not make any problems or as you said duck-tape on duck-tape.
So RedHat only needs to change their philosophy to include that possibility, if they want to.
Brgds
Red Hat actually has a tool ā leapp ā for that. It does not work on all RHEL installations.
Over the years there have been some (failed) attempts to create similar tool for distros derived from RHEL (mainly CentOS).
Last year AlmaLinux did cook up ELevate ā essentially leapp, but with data that is appropriate for the derived distros. (Red Hat does not release their RHEL-specific data.)
With āducttapeā I refer to config (and/or procedures) that has been originally created for some service that one continues to use with minimal changes in order to get new version of same service (feature-change) or (equivalent) replacement service to run. For example, we still see manually edited network configuration files (ifcfg-*) even though RHEL has had (and Red Hat has promoted) helper tools that at least check that syntax is right. For extra fun both the syntax has evolved and the tools have changed in major versions ā EL9 places all config in different place and in totally different format.
It is the very custom legacy configs and third-party content (from various repos) that the tools like āleappā apparently choke on.