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Remote migration from CentOS 6 to Fedora 16

Revision 2 vs. Revision 3

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    5 Recently I wanted to migrate a machine from CentOS 6 (i.e. EL6) to Fedora 16 but I didn't have physical access to the machine. Against my better judgement I decided to attempt to do it remotely with ``yum``. I found a pretty nice guide for upgrading from `CentOS 5 to Fedora 12 <http://geek.co.il/wp/2010/02/12/upgrading-centos-5-to-fedora-12>`_ . Fortunately CentOS 6 to F16 is even easier. The following is a *roughly outline* of how to perform such a migration.  
     5Recently I wanted to migrate a machine from CentOS 6 (i.e. EL6) to Fedora 16 but I didn't have physical access to it so I decided to do it remotely with ``yum``.  An encouraging sign was I found a pretty nice guide for upgrading from `CentOS 5 to Fedora 12 <http://geek.co.il/wp/2010/02/12/upgrading-centos-5-to-fedora-12>`_  and since CentOS 6 was newer things should be even easier. The following is a *roughly outline* of how to perform such a migration.  
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    77.. warning:: There is a really really high probability of butchering the whole operating system and having to reinstall from physical media. This is not a step-by-step guide... it's only a rough outline of the steps involved. You need to have experience with RedHat based systems.  
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    991. To make things easier, faster and to avoid some weird conflicts with m17n remove all m17n, gcc, eclipse, gnome, rhn packages, abrt, and -devel packages.  
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    78787. Reinstall the plymouth system theme (I had to remove the plymouth theme packages earlier and the machine I was upgrading is a workstation... I don't think plymouth themes are strictly necessary for headless servers)  
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    8080 ``yum install plymouth-system-theme``  
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    82 8. Check for leftover packages, ``rpm -qa | grep el6``, and deal with them as you see fit (I think ``hal`` was removed in F16 so you can get rid of it). Some packages (e.g. ``flac``, ``kpartx`` and ``ustr``) are identical between F16 and EL6. You can use the ``--force`` option to reinstall them if you would like to get rid of the ``el6`` suffix on the rpms.  
     828. Check for leftover packages, ``rpm -qa | grep el6``, and deal with them as you see fit (I think ``hal`` was removed in F16 so you can probably get rid of it). Some packages (e.g. ``flac``, ``kpartx`` and ``ustr``) are identical between F16 and EL6 but you can use the ``--force`` option of ``rpm`` to reinstall them if you would like to get rid of the ``el6`` suffix on the rpms.  
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    84849. As the blog above explains you need to move the inittab over  
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    8686 ``mv /etc/inittab.rpmnew /etc/inittab``  
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    109109  echo b > /proc/sysrq-trigger  
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    111111 The first line enables the SysReq key, the second makes sure that all files are flushed, and the last line triggers the reboot.  
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    114 12. Sit back, launch ``ping <machine_name>`` and pray to his `holy noodliness <http://www.venganza.org/>`_ that the machine comes back up.  
     11412. Sit back ping the machine continously and pray to his `holy noodliness <http://www.venganza.org/>`_ that the system comes back up.  
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    116 In my case the machine came back up and everything was fine.  
     116In my case it took about 1-2 hours and the machine rebooted successfully.  
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