[Spacewalk-list] migrating spacewalk server to newer OS

[Justin Edmands]

On Mon, Nov 11, 2013 at 12:21 PM, George <listmail.gg at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hello,
>
> I currently have a spacewalk 1.7 still running on centos 5 ia32
> For compliance reasons I would like to upgrade this one to SW 2.0 and also
> centos 6.x (latest) x86_64
> My spacewalk has an external Oracle database.
>
> Now I was wondering if anyone has tips / tricks / info on how to go with
> this migration ...
> I was thinking:
> -first upgrading the current install to spacewalk 2.0 and test.
> -take a file backup and Take the machine offline (otherwise I'll have
> IP/NAME conflicts below) and take a database backup
> -install the new machine with centos 6.4 x64 with exactly the same
> hostname (and possibly IP)
> -install spacewalk 2.0 on this machine on the normal way so I have a fresh
> spacewalk install
> -restore the database backup + the contents of the datastore where all
> rpms reside.
>
> Are there any scripts or systems to make this process easier? (on IRC seen
> some people talk about inter-sat-sync which is supposedly also possible
> with spacewalk but still requires you to copy stuff like the datastore ...)
>
> Possible pitfalls:
> -not sure what will happen if the certificates are newly generated, but
> thats not that much of a problem since what I have attached to my spacewalk
> is 8 spacewalk proxies so I need to reconnect those to the new server
> (already done that before so thats not such an issue I think) and OSAD
> doesn't work anyway on the current setup ...
> -are there any other files I should copy from the current setup to the new
> one outside of the datastore?
>
> Regards,
>
> G. (Gh0sty on the #spacewalk IRC channel)
>
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https://fedorahosted.org/spacewalk/wiki/HowToUpgrade

Among other things, you'll need to run a few database upgrade scripts and
preserve a few files that SW refers to.

I'd say import this machine to a virtual environment (or clone if you are
already virtual) and run the upgrades from 1.7 to 2.0, then make the centos
5 to 6 and i386 to x86_64 leap. Clone your database to a different server
for testing if you want it to remain external. Backup your database and
spacewalk configs and you'll always have a revert point.

I wouldn't worry about the RPM directory (/var/satellite/redhat for me). It
will just download them again when the next sync runs. Migrating all of
that data would be a HUGE pain if you don't have a working system and have
to revert it. My RPM directory is about 60GB. Flushed it once and it
regenerated over the weekend.

Lastly, OSAD is a beautiful thing. Biggest issue I know of right now is
that the jabber database gets stale and nothing will check in again, ever.
A simple service restart will cause the thing to crash and never recover. I
changed the start scripts to include a "rm -f /var/lib/jabberd/db/*" before
executing anything. Works great.
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