Migration from Linux 5.1 to Linux 6.2 (newbie)
by: John Plane

This article talks about my experience migrated from Linux 5.1 to version 7.0. The total process of this migration has been close to 3 weeks now! The configuration of this Linux box has been changed many times and finally has reached its limits!

Reason for the upgrade is to provide a higher level of hardware support and to upgrade Linux's core components in one big bang! My experience with Linux is minimal so excuse the lack of Linux Guru terms!

Why we like Linux so much? Well considering I've passed all my M$ to obtain my MCSE you'd think I'd be more involved in Windoze? Well the fact is since I've experience the joys of Linux I've had trouble justifying why not to use Linux for Server based tasks!

In my opinion Linux is just better overall! It provides extreme stability where it matters most! If you have a server where users are dependent on email you need dependability not more BSOD! Enough of my talk here is the what I've done so far!

Here is the facts:

System Name: Pegasus
Kernel Version: 2.0.36
RedHat: 5.1
Services Running:
BIND
SSH
TELNET
APACHE
SENDMAIL
SAMBA

Hardware:
CPU: Pentium Pro 200
Memory: 96 MEGS (SIMMS)
Harddrive: SCSI 9G
NIC: 3C950 10bt
Video: ATI MACH 64
SCSI: BusLogic BT-958 PCI Wide Ultra SCSI Adapter

The goal is to migrate all the settings and directories to the new server. This should be transparent to the user. The following directories are ones of importance that have to be TAR BALLED and place on a server to be d/l from Linux Machine.

How I started was to TAR the following directories:

/home (with the exception of some garbage that was old!)
/var spool (waited until after hours and should be last)
/etc/named (included all are name settings for BIND, this file has changed to named.conf in later versions of Linux)
/etc/passwd (includes all the users and passwords)
/wwwhost (includes a symbolic link to all the users Websites)
/etc/aliases (all the aliases for email accounts)
/home/apache/etc (this directory contains all the files for the Apache configuration)

After all this files are compressed into a TAR file I copied them to a machine with a ftp server. This allowed me to d/l this files from the ftp server without putting the Old Linux box update which would conflict with the new until it was completely down.

I removed the Old Linux box from the network and plugged in the new. Then proceeded to d/l all the TAR Balls to a directory I created. Once all the files were d/l which added up to over 2G I extracted them to the appropriate directories.

Each Service required me to configure properly by adding and configuring Virtual Web Sites, Virtual IP Addresses, setting up all the symbolic links and configuring the Nameserver by converting the named.boot to named.conf with the converting utility that was included with the install.

Here is a list of the following tasks that were required and information on problems that occurred and how they were resolved.

1> Symbolic Links:
We had 1 symbolic links for the website stuff. Here are the commands below I ran to recreate the symbolic links for Apache.

# (pwd: /) ln -sf /var/www www

2> Virtual Hosts
# added using 'linuxconf'
# 209.xx.xx.129-140 209.xx.xx.142 209.xx.xx.145-148 to ETH0
# using subnet mask of 255.255.255.0 for all IP address.

3> Configure startup tasks using /usr/sbin/ntsysv
# ntsysv utility allows you to specify what daemons you wanted started each time you
# reboot.
# for security reasons all daemons were disabled including telnet.

4> Configure Sendmail
# ran 'mailconf' setup alias and generated sendmail.cf file.
# there are several ways you can initially configure sendmail. The .mc files are included so you can
# customize them and created .cf files. Sendmail has changed the directory structure and a few
# of the key files required:
# example: /etc/sendmail.cf > /etc/mail/local-host-names
# also the sendmail config directory is exclusively locating in /etc/mail/*
# once all the files were transfer I needed to run a makemap hash on all .db files.

# Problems with initial config:

# Error: Config error. mail loops back to me (MX problem?).
# Reason: checked /etc/mail/local-host-names and noticed I was missing one domain that it was # # trying to send email to.
# Resolution: Once I added the domain and restarted sendmail everything was ok.
# http://www.redhat.com/support/docs/faqs/RH-sendmail-FAQ/x64.html

# Error with mail routing delay in sending message and gets sent to /var/spool/mqueue
# message id host map: lookup deferred
# Reason: The .db files are out of date and aren't consistent with the current install.
# Resolution: After updating all the .db files everything seemed to
# be happy.

5> Apache Web Server
# Configure Virtual Hosts in <VirtualHost> section of /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf

# Error when starting Apache "bad username apache" added apache to apache group
# Reason: When starting the httpd service it needs to have apache user in apache group.
# Resolution: adduser apache -g apache

6> Import all users from /etc/passwd, everything worked great until I tried to changed a
# password for a user here is the error I got:
# Error: passwd: Authentication token manipulation error (use pwconv and gpconv)
# Reason: The users were actually not using shadowed password before, but when I
# installed I choose shadowed password.
# Resolution: Changed the passwd file to be shadowed.
# Utility: system-auth is a great utility for password management.
# http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/history/207

Information Links used during the migration:

APACHE Server FAQs
http://httpd.apache.org/docs/misc/FAQ.html
Support for xinetd.d
http://www.xinetd.org/
Support from Redhat 6.0 - 7.0
http://www.redhat.com/apps/support/resources/index.html
New features of 7.0
http://www.it.redhat.com/products/software/linux/rhl7_new_features.html
Majordomo aliases HowTo
http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/docs/HOWTO/other-formats/html_single/Majordomo-MajorCool-HOWTO.html
Sendmail FAQS
http://www.sendmail.org/faq