Switching from Redhat Linux to Oracle Linux in about 5,000 easy steps

• Here’s screenshots from the TUI

It always seems to say this...

Hit next to waive all your rights

Not sure I like hard coding my ULN login

Hardware gathered information

RPMs

• Update your Repos and packages
  • cd /etc/yum.repos.d
  • rename your existing .repo files
    • mv rhel-source.repo rhel-source.repo.old
    • mv rhel-debuginfo.repo rhel-debuginfo.repo.old
    • note that the .repo suffix is what signifies that a repo file is “active”
  • use wget to fetch the oracle repos
    • wget http://public-yum.oracle.com/public-yum-el5.repo
  • edit the public-yum-el5.repo to activate (enable) the appropriate subscription channels
    • [ol5_u7_base]
    • …
    • enabled=1
  • update your packages
    • # up2date -i yum-rhn-plugin
    • # yum update
  • #yum install kernel
  • #yum install kernel-uek (optional, install the unbreakable kernel)
  • #yum install oracle-linux (optional Oracle packages, pair with UEK I believe)
• reboot to new kernel
  • check /etc/grub.conf to ensure it is to your satisfaction
  • #reboot -i to restart the host, select the appropriate kernel when the grub menu option appears

First Impressions

So what I failed to mention in my original post were impressions about the migration.  We’ve been running Oracle Linux 5.7 for 3 weeks now.   Aside from the branding/logo changes  (A penguin in Oracle armor instead of the Red Hat shadow man) I don’t see much difference at all.  Not that I’d really have any reason to expect to.

Since this OS upgrade coincided with a  hardware upgrade, I feel it would be unfair to speculate on performance improvement.  Meaning, I suspect anything works better on the latest CPU and hardware architecture.  Suffice it to say, after a short period of fretting about the new OS, I just don’t monitor it anymore.  It works fine.

My concern about how much more manual the Oracle Linux experience hasn’t changed much.  I now understand that I could create a local RPM mirror, which would be updated daily through Oracle Enterprise Manger 11g, and thus through Enterprise Manager, I could push or release updates to my Oracle Linux servers.  That’s all fine and good, but that’s just one more layer of complication I’d rather not have to deal with.  I may go that route eventually, but since I’m comparing apples to apples, I simply say:  “I don’t have to do that with Red Hat”.

One impression I got throughout the whole conversion process was a general disjointedness from Oracle.  One of the main reasons I posted this blog entry was because the whole process, from information (sales) to install is all over the place.  I mean literally, all over the place.  The steps above are provided in a complete manner nowhere that I am aware of.  There’s a document here about how to wget the repo’s, a document there about how to deal with duplicate RHN UUID’s, another page to download the up2date RPMs, another page telling you how to register with the Oracle Linux network.  I suppose I can’t expect Oracle to advertise that the UEK kernel isn’t certified for VMWare, but it’s important, and I’d rather have learned that up front than on my own trying to boot a DEV VM into UEK.   Support told me to use up2date to update my packages, but when I put that in my (original) blog posting here, I was corrected in the comments and told of yum-rhn-plugin (noted in the steps above).   I looked back to see what Open World I was at when Oracle Linux was announced:  it was Fall of 2006.  I would think that after 5 years, this would be a bit more refined.

All that said, my final word on this is that while frustrating and non-intuitive, the migration to Oracle Linux has been fine.  It’s too early to say I recommend it, but I will say at this point, that I’m not regretting moving to it, and I think it’s worth a look.  Even if you’re from the old-school Sun/RedHat/AIX/HPUX environments like me.

Switching from Redhat Linux to Oracle Linux in about 5,000 easy steps

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