Migrations Made Simple: The Beauty of Unix

“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.

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