Arch Linux

hypermegachi

Member

Registered: 2004-07-25

Posts: 311

installing centos over arch?

almost feels wrong posting the question here, but arch is my home!  [zealot]ARCH FOR THE WIN![/zealot]

anyways, in the coming months i think i may be moving to the big city, which means i'll be leaving my current job.  it's currently running arch and is doing a whole bunch of stuff hosting apache, subversion, and samba, standard stuff.

the problem is that i'm the only one at the company who is linux saavy enough to manage the server.  so in my absence i think it would be the responsible thing to do by replacing it with CentOS, because it's free, has long time support if they ever need it, and it has GUI tools for configuration.

now the actual situation...what's the safe way to install over my pre-existing install?  i have a whole bunch of stuff in scripts and /var/www and stuff like that that i don't wanna have to reinstall.

i was thinking of doing something like this:
- boot into liveCD
- move / into /arch or something like that
- run the CentOS installer and instead of formatting, mount and install
- make sure everything still works

sound like a viable plan?

Mr. Ego

Member

Registered: 2007-12-04

Posts: 20

Re: installing centos over arch?

Yep, I think this is very good. Backup everything you need, double check that you backed up everything, then check again that you backed up everything and you can install.

Perhaps it could be good to save to an external medium just to be sure.

It depends what filesystem do you use at your current system. CentOS only installs at file systems that support extented ACLs (or something like it). If you have reiserfs partition, it won't install. I read that there is a way to install on it (trough some kernel parameter), but this could be problematic.

Good luck

Endperform

Member

From: Atlanta GA, USA

Registered: 2007-09-04

Posts: 94

Website

Re: installing centos over arch?

Definitely make sure you take a backup of everything important.  If you're using a site with apache / mysql / php, make sure you make note of any modules or the like you had to install or any customizations you had to do to get the sites up and running.  I've never just installed a distro on top of an existing one without formatting, so it's possible you might run into some weirdness.  But to recap:

1) Backup /var/www and your scripts
2) Make note of any special configuration changes you might have made
3) Install

If you have the option to move data to another partition or drive and do a complete clean install, that may be even safer.

hypermegachi

Member

Registered: 2004-07-25

Posts: 311

Re: installing centos over arch?

yeah, backup is a must of course

unfortunately, the centos installer crashed on my virtualbox pc when i tried to mount pre-existing LVM partitions :'(
so i might have to do the whole wipe everything out after all, which i wanted to avoid because that would take the most time.

but i gotta say, all the configuration tools almost makes things too easy.  i remember struggling to get winbind and ADS working over samba, and while i have a good understand of doing all the text configuration now, i didn't realize on RHE you just click "use winbind" and click OK.

Last edited by hypermegachi (2007-12-08 21:51:29)