"On my to-do list one day last week was to migrate an aging Fedora Core 3 server to new hardware running CentOS 5.2. At first glance, it seemed to be a pretty straightforward task. If the old server had been running just a single app or service, it would have been simple, but the reality was that this server was running eight FLEXlm license servers, several small Web applications, a smattering of network telemetry tools, functioned as an NIS slave, served as a loghost and hosted a local CentOS yum repository.
"I had an edge here due to the simple fact that I built this server four years ago, but that's far from making this a slam dunk. Many, many things have changed at the OS level between Fedora Core 3 and CentOS 5.2 (which is basically RHEL 5), the number of services provided by the server had quintupled, and I had only a five-minute window to make the swap.
"However, these are Linux boxes. That makes all the difference.
