CIQ Migration Series: CentOS to Rocky Linux

um i was dismayed to see that the end of life was happening with centos 8 so early so i was definitely looking for a community focused alternative that i could use like i said is both a server os and a workstation os so i'm very happy to have the option to use rocky linux to fill that niche so as zane said i'm going to be taking you through today how to convert a centos 8 system to a rocky 8 system using the migrate to rocky script that we have out there this script is going to basically swap out the repositories and packages that make up

the centos 8 install and then reinstall new repositories for rocky and new packages there i want to point out that this migrate to rocky script works great for kind of small scale migrations at least in the way that i'm going to be using it today it works fantastic for uh in the way that i'm going to be showing it small scale migrations like maybe you're moving over one server or you know your workstation something like that or maybe even you just want to play around with it and test vm we're going to do some more webinars kind of later that'll go over some more um

large-scale kind of enterprise focus deployments here of how to um you know migrate and mass from centos a to rocky maybe with tools like ansible terraform cloudiness pollumi stuff like that but for now this is going to be a basic webinar that's just going to show how to do this for a single system using that migrate to rocky script so i have a terminal open here yep there we go cool so i have a terminal open here this is basically just vert manager sitting on a centos a vm i'll go ahead and pause this and start booting this um and once we're in here i'll

show you how to get the script how to set up the script run and then how to run it um so we'll wait for this to boot here for just a moment um you know just to show you that i'm here on centos 8. just waiting a moment okay so we're now here uh let me just ensure yep that can be seen well cool uh i'll just go ahead and password in really quickly all right so we're here on our centos 8 system i'll go ahead and just do a quick cat etsy os release and i'll scale up for the terminal so we can see a little better but you can see here we have cat etsy os release centos linux version 8.

so we're here on centos 8. i'm going to go ahead and pull up firefox really quickly so that we can go ahead and retrieve the script from where it is online to do that i will just go ahead and really quickly google migrate to rocky and you can see we have the documentation page for the migration script here on the rocky linux site first off before we get started on anything i really recommend and would push for reading through all this information here um this is going to kind of go over some of your prerequisites um kind of an introduction to what this tool does

and you know how it works there's a few caveats and warnings there you'll see for example check out the readme page we'll look at that in just a second um there's some caveats and warnings um and then the rest of this here kind of is going over what i'm going to show here today so this is basically just getting the script executing it and then just kind of showing how that's gonna work um so i won't linger on this for too long like i said i'm about to show this live um but there's some uh manual instructions there to refer back to uh we'll go

ahead and open this up now and this is gonna take us to the rocky linux github and you can see that we have this migrate to rocky script uh this is the readme that it was referring to on that previous page so please make sure to give this a look over this will tell you like some disk based requirements there that you have to abide by um some known issues uh some kind of you know things that don't work things that you maybe need to account for if you have a more um specialized environment but like i said in further webinars we'll also take a

look at a more specialized kind of enterprise focused environments um but yeah do make sure that you look over this read me like i said it goes over some issues some you know brief requirements that kind of stuff um so that will probably be useful uh but um i'm just gonna go ahead and run the script like i said i'm on basically just a fresh vm here so i don't really have any special considerations so i'm just going to go ahead and grab this script and we'll exit out of this bring up a terminal really quickly and i'm going to let's see here just make

this font a little bit bigger okay there we go so we have that script copied all we basically need to do is just um put it into a script file so we'll just v end one here and paste that script in there you can see it's somewhat long we'll go ahead and save that and then just do a chmod plus x migrate to rocky.sh whoops u.s h there we go to make that script executable and from here that's basically all we have to do to get this set up um at least in this case so i will just go ahead and run the script now

which will be sudo and migrate to rocky.sh and then provide the r flag which tells it to go ahead and um run the migration it prompts for a password we'll enter and the migrate to rocky script starts up so you'll see that this begins logging a log of this this install is made available at a location on your um system here i couldn't tell you exactly where it is right off the top of my head but i'll show it in just a moment um you'll see that this is going to start up the first thing that it's going to do is it's looking at um

you know some of the repositories that are present on your system and where they map to in rocky you'll see it's going to do that for a few different packages here and a few different repos sorry a few different repos here and then we're going to start into downloading some packages i think we've all watched plenty of installs and plenty of packages installed in our time uh this is basically you know watching paint dry um so after this runs here for a second i'm gonna switch over to another vm that i have that is this exact same vm except for i just run the script

to completion and it's ready to reboot um but as i said before we do that this is basically going to be the form of execution for the rest of this migration it's going to go ahead and download all of these packages 1345 of them and it's going to go ahead and swap out the installed os packages for the rocky packages that were downloaded here and i believe it has something 2600 packages in this vm that it has to redo so this takes this migration on this vm takes approximately 20 minutes or so and like i said we won't uh sit here and watch that for

all those 20 minutes um so uh i'm gonna go ahead and switch this over um like i said this will basically just download and install just like any uh package install um so i'm gonna go ahead and switch over to my other vm that i have prepared stop sharing there and i will start sharing this one right here okay let's make sure that everyone can see that well enough cool so you can see i'm here in another vm this is also just vert manager um this is essentially just a clone of the vm i was just on um except for i've let this uh that

script run to completion and then paused it at the final step of it um that's about 20 minutes of install 2600 packages we don't want to sit through that so i will go up here and unpause this vm really quickly and you can see just a well there i'll do this just to increase the font so everyone can see a little easier um scrolling back to this terminal output to just kind of show what this did uh you can see that oh it goes past 10 000 so it doesn't show at all but you can see those 2684 packages being installed um verified and then

here at the end it's complete you get a little message from the script saying done please reboot your system and a message to where the vlog of the installation can be found as i said there would be so i will go ahead and just do a pseudo reboot on this and when we come back you'll see that just to show you oh what i'm not sure why i have that background there um but just to show you really quickly um some of our information is kind of switched over here already we'll do sudo reboot and then provide our password and we'll see now that the

branding has changed to rocky on this and we now have centos or not sorry not sent to us we now have rocky linux 8.5 available to select on here um and you can see that centos available there but i'll go ahead and boot into rocky really quickly and show what uh that'll look like so like i said you can kind of see the branding and some things like that so this will take a second to boot um and once i'm done with that the migration is complete um you can go about using your new rocky system uh and then as far as the demo goes

here we'll open it up to some q a so you can see we have the rocky branding do that right there and now here we are on rocky linux i got a question for you for us so why why does it go through and add and remove the packages what is it what is it doing or what are those packages actually doing in there so essentially it's just taking out the centos eight repositories that are um maintained separately from rocky linux by the entities that maintain centos it's essentially just taking those repos out replacing them with the rocky linux ones uninstalling the software that is

made for the centos versions of it and then installing the packages out of the rocky repo essentially is what's going on there so very good thank you and yeah just to one more time cat etsy os release and you can see that we are here on rocky linux so yeah that is about what i had for as far as the migration demo um i said we'll open up to q a so feel free to ask your questions in whatever chat you have available uh and we will answer as we can sure so the first question that we have uh we actually have neil who is

a part of our support organization as well welcome neil awesome hey thanks so the first question that we actually got was from vanad venad thank you for your question we appreciate it uh it's asking you is there a is there a process for migrating from scent seven to rocky eight uh that one comes up quite often i'm sure you guys run across it quite often too uh how are we handling that today and what are our plans for that yeah there's a there's a couple of really great options uh you know personally i would always recommend if possible to upgrade and switch over to the

the new um operating system up to to a version 8 via a fresh install and using your configuration management or if you don't have configuration management it's a great time to to start building that configuration management to uh you know have immutable or adequate ways to deploy that infrastructure so you can easily go between hosts and if your host happens to go down you can also use you know that same infrastructure to rebuild that very quickly as part of your disaster recovery plan or part of your disaster recovery plan overall which should be you know larger than that but um for upgrading just in place

that that is possible currently alma linux does a um you know tool called elevate that's um able to upgrade and that uses the leap um framework that red hat builds and is able to uh bill uh give their customers as a value add to their support so that's an open source project that they've released for the community that works to upgrade centos and and other uh cenos7 to uh centos 8 or any other distribution so you could actually i believe go straight from um centos 7 to rocky linux 8 um in one fell swoop but that is remember kind of a really large jump from

seven to eight like we're talking many years of fedora code um between those two releases and so there's just a lot that can change and it's it's it's not impossible but the the option is uh not necessarily uh the best idea in my my opinion um but it's it works and there's people that have reported it working so there's definitely something to be said for that excellent thank you enough for the question thanks neil so one of the next ones uh one of the next questions is coming from sea lovers and it the question is about if i have something installed on my centos box

but it's not in the rocky repo and i'll take a first shot at this one if you look at the way the migration script works it's looking for very specific packages that are associated with sent install those are the shared libraries and things that are very common and it tries to replace them with the packages that rocky has that are similar it's not going to look at every package you have and try to replace it if it's not necessary for a part of that migration so i don't think that that's something you're going to really have a problem with because again it's looking for something

very specific but i'll let neil and forrest weigh in on that one yeah that's a that's a pretty great overview there are some release notes or on the readme inside the the migrate to rocky folder i don't remember if uh for us touched on this but um there was a there's a few things specifically to note about certain packages and modules like java etsy alternatives is one of those um there's so there's a few things that definitely should be reviewed there as well as the documentation on docs.rockylinux.org um but yeah i think that's a that's a pretty great overview boris do good yeah i'm good

on that thank you neil so the next question is actually an interesting one and it's something we'll be probably addressing in a future webinar it's really about doing larger scale migrations from scents to rocky uh really focused around using ansible i know neil talked about item potent earlier and that's a fantastic word that's used in ansible quite often so i will i will let neil take a shot at that one is does it exist today is there any any thing that we are going to do to kind of help that from an ansible playbook and kind of an ansible migration process yeah i mean one

of the simplest things that you could do is just write an answer playbook that goes through upgrades your system to the latest centos release that's done by the script itself but um if you want to just go ahead and pre-upgrade your host or hosts to the centos release that's latest um pretty quickly here because we only have about 11 days left until it's eol um you can upgrade the host with ansible and then deploy out that migrate to rockyscript and run it on the host uh either one by one or you know kind of you know check your risk tolerance there make sure you have

backups which you could also integrate as part of that script um and yeah i think that's something that we've been kind of looking into because it's been asked before and people have been looking for it to work on some frameworks that might help in certain scenarios whether you're running um you know a over cluster or a openstack or vmware like how to help upgrade those hosts in certain situations to help the community and people that are trying to get out of this kind of situation that we're in and in a quick manner that will you know enable them to get on with their lives and

just to kind of yeah thank you neil um just to kind of touch on our side of it a little bit um we are as i kind of alluded to at the start of this planning to do more of these webinars this one was mostly just focused on kind of setting up a test bed for it or you know moving one workstation or something like that over future webinars will kind of go into some more enterprise scale migration topics you know like we talked about using ansible um maybe using terraform cloudinet palomi different tools like that um so yeah that's something that we plan to

cover in future webinars kind of those more large-scale based migrations yeah one of the other questions that i see and i've had come up this is really focused around centos to rocky migrations today i know there are other rpm based variants out there that that do migrations from one to the other uh is this something that we would look at from anything other than centos to a rocky migration is that script viable for that could you make the changes fairly easily to do that migration have we had other customers do that or is it not even somebody to look at yet guys i would have

to look at exactly what the other supported distros are on it but i'm fairly certain it also supports converting from rocky from a couple of other ones um let me take a look really quickly it's right there on that documentation page for the rocky linux site um so yeah let's see here yeah alma oracle linux yeah it also supports switching to rocky from alma or oracle linux which is what i thought i just wanted to confirm that i think it's been tested or a previous version of it has been tested on red hat as well uh probably repeat that test um i've been thinking actually

from the rocky linux side to make some integration testing playbooks that are running in our gitlab to make sure that the script is working to uh test every you know day or so just spin up a vm and convert it over so maybe that's a project for next week excellent thank you so vana asked another good question uh are we going to talk about werewolf and other open hpc events in the future and to answer that question yes we are that is a part of this series we are going to go into the other parts of our portfolio uh force we'll be back doing other

demos of other great things that we are working on and doing so yes absolutely we will be not just talking about rocky going forward although rocky is a good focus for us it is not the only thing we do so yes we will be talking about uh open hpc and hpc 2.0 and kind of everything we're doing around that going forward so one of the things that we run across quite often is people asking about security uh and how how rocky linux is going to be different when it comes to security uh one of the questions i want running across actually today was do we

support secure boot yet yes as a rocky 85 secure boot is supported um so that is no longer a concern we are working on getting our fip certification so that will be coming here shortly as well and then as a part of a partnership that we have we we are working with another security company to actually compile into rocky as it goes to the build process uh a tool that actually does in-memory randomization for most of the shared libraries that are compiled into the kernel and as a part of the base uh rocky linux so that eliminates between 40 and 50 of in memory attacks

so that makes rocky by default a lot more secure that can be extended into your software and compiled with your software as well to take it beyond that 40 and 50 percent to make it further further supported so we are very interested in security we are really interested in what else can we do with rocky and where can we go with rocky outside of just being a one-for-one rpm based distro that's out there so we want to add value the other thing that we've really looked at and focused on is making sure that rocky is a very large community driven tool it's not it's not

one of the others that's very small that's controlled by a few people this one is a much larger we have about 15 000 people i think now as a part of the community so it is grown very quickly its first release was in correctly from wrong forest july so between july and now we've got 15 000 people probably about 10 million downloads and installs so it's growing quite a lot yeah and just uh kind of play off of that really quickly and plug our mattermost channel kind of one of the central hubs of that rocky linux community is the mattermost channel that we have there's

a lot of you know discussion both about rocky linux generally the development of it as well as a lot of different special interest groups um that are using rocky for a lot of different things so a lot of different info in there um if you're interested in joining the community interacting with that uh yeah the matter most would be a great option excellent thank you for that for us so you have not asked another good question about these webinars going forward do we have a schedule of the webinars planned we have an idea of how we're going to do this we haven't actually published it

yet i am pretty sure that our marketing guy is is sitting there with his wheels spinning right now trying to trying to hit me and tell me what to say but what we're looking at is doing at least one of these every at least once a month if not every other week so yeah you'll start to see quite a bit quite a bit more coming out of ciq and what we're working on and how we're helping drive the community so stay tuned yeah i just need confirmation once every two weeks maybe you'll come back every two weeks too yeah anything else that you guys would

like to cover while we're here forest neil anything that's burning top of mind for you um nothing too uh particularly for me just that you know i'm happy using rocky as always like i said i basically use it as my daily driver for my workstation and stuff like that um so i'm very pleased with rocky i find it to be a great drop-in replacement for sentiless and i have had no complaints about it so excited to continue forward with more of these webinars and get more info about it out there yeah definitely um nothing else top of mind for me but it's an end of

the day here or so foods on the mind instead sea lovers keeps coming up with great questions we appreciate it see lovers thanks for coming to this uh so are we planning on creating any other os based on rocky and i think this is one of the things that we get really excited about when we start looking at the roadmap of rocky and what rocky can become if you look at most of the rpm based distros out there and you look at some of the others like ubuntu typically the rpm ones look like they're old and behind the kernel is older if you really start

digging in it's 18 months to two years behind from a kernel standpoint so we've actually looked at having a another spin-off of rocky and call probably something like rocky mainline where it will actually implement the mainline kernel so it will be more up-to-date and more equivalent with the other distros that are out there especially around cloud environments so yes we will have other distros that you will see that are optimized for different things cloud environments containers are very big for us we have our own container platform singularity now call that taner so yes being a part of that base container image is very big for

us we have a lot of customers asking us for that so you will see more and more about that in these future webinars i am sure and just uh rocky does rock just add a little bit more there um i just wanted to say that i already use rocky as uh you know the base image for a lot of containers i build kind of in you know what i do with certain things and i already you know work with docker all that kind of stuff on rocky um so well yeah we definitely have a lot of plans for different um you know optimizations and stuff

rocky is already a fantastic solution if you're looking for just a general base image for a container or if you're looking for something to deploy a containerized you know containerization platform on and use it for something like that next question is do we actually post ansible playbooks in libraries somewhere i have not seen it as of yet i'm not going to say that there's not another community is very large and growing it's probably out there if you search github hard enough you could probably find whatever you're looking for just like everything else in the ansible but i'm not i'm not going to speak for ciq

because i don't know who we are no i don't think we do as of now is there a location with instructions to download and burn rocky to a live usb oh a lot of ways to go about doing that keith um that's one of those things that that we could probably point you to an article or we could just follow up with you if you want to shoot one of us an email or a note um just zayn ciq.com shoot me something and we can we can help you with that for sure yeah i think it's also in the uh installation instructions on docs.rockylinux.org perfect

and uh just to kind of move back to that previous question for future webinars that we'll do um if we have some materials like that that you could use to kind of replicate mess around with it on our own um we'll definitely make sure to kind of make those materials available so that people can you know follow along with a recording or something like that if they want to and do it for themselves and sorry i misspoke at zayn at ciq.co.com co just zio any other questions guys not seeing anything else again this is just the beginning for us this is gonna be in every

two week thing uh we're looking forward to seeing what you guys bring to us always looking forward to your questions like to hear about your workloads whatever you're working on if you have other ideas or suggestions for things that you would like to see us doing we're always interested in hearing that to see how we can help the community and help you guys grow we want to make you guys successful that's really where we we want to spend our time with people not servers so thank you very much uh community forums for rocky forum forums.rocky.org should be all of the community for rocky anyone else

and not only is there a you know live usb version of rocky out there for any hobbyists in the sphere there's even somebody's put together um you know raspberry pi images stuff like that and you can burn them use them on your you know little micro computer platforms and stuff as well so those are pretty fun to mess around with i have done that one that's actually running a desktop go uh if you have any suggestions how can you reach us a lot of different ways you can send us emails you can join the actual community and start start contributing back to the matter most

forums um a lot of different ways but we would love to talk to you and and help whatever becomes the best way for you to give us feedback is how we want to help you so i mean again shoot me an email zane at ciq.co and we can get that started go join go join the community at rocky.org a lot of different ways [Music] and with that we really appreciate the time guys we are here for you always free consultations feel free to reach out to us let us know how we can help always willing to do whatever we can to make this community grow

and to be better we really appreciate your time and looking forward to two weeks from today cool yes thank you all indeed i appreciate everyone being here and everyone uh neil also thank you for all of your information and zane for posting thank you everyone looking forward to the next one in two weeks thanks guys