moving from debian to centos

Hi all,

I need to move from debian 4 to centos 5.5 (cause debian 4 is no longer supported, and I’m trying to standardize on the latter).

I have the latest virtualmin pro on both. I tried the backup and restore feature, and sadly alot broke. I have just over 30 domains and did not check all of them as the most important ones were the broken ones, so the lesser ones didn’t matter much.

The question is this: Is there a recommended method I do this crazy upgrade? Did I check too many (or not check enough) boxes in the restore panel?

I understand that I’m jumping technology here, but I was hoping the virtualmin pro being the same version would handle it.

If the answer is: “There is no easy fix, just plan all the repairs for each site and trudge through it” then I guess I’ll have to accept.

I’m just looking for tips and advice from anyone who has insight into this procedure.

Thanks,

GS

Howdy,

Actually, that’s exactly what we’d normally recommend for performing a migration… it typically works fairly well, minus a few tweaks you may have to make.

One of the things you may need to watch for is to verify that all the dependencies for your applications are installed.

For example, if you’re using a web app that requires a module like php-gd, and php-gd isn’t installed by default, the app may appear to be broken.

Migrating your websites from Debian 4 to CentOS 5 should be fairly straight forward… so if you find yourself running into issues, feel free to let us know what those are here, perhaps there’s a common theme between the issues you’re seeing.

-Eric

Wow, another super fast reply. You rock!

Anyway, I honestly haven’t researched it too much (being lazy, making virtualmin do all the work).

I’ll confirm all the loaded apache modules.

Both servers, since they use virtualmin, store the domains in /home/domainname, so I know there is no path problem there. Do i need to be aware of other path problems, though?

There are checkboxes as options in the restore. I won’t list them all, but these are the first two options:

Module configuration
Server templates and plans

Are these options either known to help or break while moving between OS’s? Should I definitely enable or not enable any of them?

Thanks again for the help.

GS

Howdy,

You should be able to migrate all those options without a problem. Moving from one distribution to another really shouldn’t matter, for the most part.

If things aren’t working right after you migrate your sites, let us know what sorts of errors you’re getting, and perhaps we can figure out the cause.

-Eric

Hmm… what do you see if you type this:

ls -l /usr/bin/php*

It sounds like there’s one binary in particular that’s missing… I’m not sure why yet, but the output of that “ls” command will help diagnose that :slight_smile:

Also, what do you get when typing this:

rpm -qa | grep php

Thanks!

-Eric

Yeah, PHP4 doesn’t get much testing on the systems here these days, as PHP has discontinued support for it, so using it is a security concern :slight_smile:

However, it’s possible that creating a symlink would solve your trouble. Try running this:

ln -s /usr/bin/php4 /usr/bin/php4-cgi

Nuts, sorry about the typo! I corrected that in my post :slight_smile:

Glad to hear it’s working for you!

-Eric