Hi

The new [production] box will have cpanel installed and the data center will only install fedora, freeBSD or Debian.

I would want to upgrade to centos once I get the box.

My question is:

which of these OSs will accept an upgrade to centos?


Thanks in advance.

Seems like fedora would be easier to "upgrade to centos", but you are going to spend about 200 hours doing it. That's 100 hours of your time, then 99 hours for someone else to try, then one hour to reinstall CentOS.

In other words, you're not going to want to try to uprade any of these to CentOS.

Thanks Mark,

Question rephrased then:

Would I be able to install centOS on a server,remotely, while the existing OS is Debian, Fedora or freeBSD?

Would cpanel have to be reinstalled then?

is there a how to guide for centos installation?

Regards

It is possible, but very difficult. It would be easier if you had two disk drives, but still difficult. You would need to reinstall cpanel. Check CentOS's web (http://www.caosity.org/) site for a how to.

The problem is that Fedora is newer than CentOS, so it would technically be a downgrade in packages.

Debian is not even the same family as CentOS (The Redhat Family)

FreeBSD is not even the same type of operating system (BSD vs. Linux)

You definatley would not want to try migrating any of these to CentOS if you are not very serious with the operating system. Fedora would be the 'easiest' out of them, but I use that term very loosely. Installing CentOS on top of any of those would be a very ver hard task as mentioned above. Even with two disk drives it is not fun at all. Why not just stick with FC2?

Thank you bitserve and justadollarhostin,

I have read that Fedora is not really suitable to run as a production server, that is why I was hoping to use centOS.

It seams That FC2 or 3 is the way now

Whoa whoa whoa, slow down here people. Fedora is not newer than CentOS, at least not all versions. Hosting providers still install Core 1 and Core 2.

If you're going to go with Fedora and upgrade to CentOS, install Core 1 and get TheLinuxGuy to upgrade your server to CentOS. It can be done remotely in just a few hours. It's not as hard as some people think/say it is. Its a few simple commands and just waiting for the packages to download and install.

If you installed Debian or FreeBSD you wont be able to upgrade to CentOS as they are not in the same family of operating systems.


Fedora gets out dated very quickly, with me versions coming out every 6 months. So unless you plan to upgrade your servers every 6 months to the latest release, I would install Fedora Core 1 and upgrade to CentOS (which isn't as hard as some people think it is!)

I'm sure it's easy to run yum to update all of your rpms, but are you going to end up with CentOS, and is it going to boot? Maybe someone from rack911 can chime in on whether he's had success at this. I'd want console access to try that, and a CentOS machine to compare against (maybe run mtree to see what diffs need to be corrected after the rpm update). And then you need to make sure that cpanel didn't get broke.

Anyway, typically the argument is that you don't want to use Fedora because it's a hobbiest Linux and is not commercially supported. Well, CentOS isn't a commercially support Linux either. I don't see a big difference. If you want an enterprise Linux that is commercially supported, use Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and not it's hobbiest rip off.

Ok,

Fedora core 1: Can be done fairly simple. There are a bunch of dependencys you may encounter but its fairly simple.

Fedora core 2: DO NOT DO IT, you have to replace the rpm database with that of a older version of redhat. But even then its not recommended because of file dependencys. Ive ran into everything from perl breaking 100% to unbootable box because of modutils.

Its not really a "good" idea to downgrade. 90% of the fedora packages are of newer version numbers, which YUM centos as being old.


Regarding cpanel breaking...

/scripts/upcp --force
/scripts/exim4
/scripts/easyapache

and everything should repair itself, after the operating system is updated.


Freebsd your out of luck.

Debian: http://v5.0-pre.racon.net/misc/DebianRemoteInstall/debremote.html

You "can" do it by modifying that process.