[Spacewalk-list] migrating spacewalk server to newer OS

[George]

On 11/11/2013 06:40 PM, Justin Edmands wrote:
>
>
>
> On Mon, Nov 11, 2013 at 12:21 PM, George <listmail.gg at gmail.com
> <mailto: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.

Ofcourse I'll take backups (it all runs on top of vmware esx)

> 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.
Well mine is around 80GB or more already and it's on an NFS mount from 
shared storage anyway so it's not that problematic.

>
> 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.

Well I use spacewalk proxies and (it's now been a year ago) when I tried 
to fix this I ran into a bug with jabber not being able to work through 
the proxy ... it was something that's fixed upstream but no newer jabber 
package was available at the time (in EPEL) but I should check again if 
there are no fixes in the mean time.

Regards,

G.