IPSConfig Works After CentOS 7.9 -> Alma Linux 8.10 -> Alma Linux 9.4

Just a general note that ISPCOnfig 3.2.12 works after upgrading from CentOS 7.9 to Alma Linux 8.10, and finally to Alma Linux 9.4. I used the leapp package to "upgrade in place" for both OS upgrades. Some notes:

NOTES:

1. Backup your entire server before the upgrade. If a random package breaks the leapp upgrade process, you may need to restore your server. I have daily Rapid Restore backups that saved me once during the upgrade.
2. Backup all your MySQL databases.
3. Backup all service config files. Even though leapp will save previous configs as file~ or file.rpmsave, you should back them all up in advance. More on why below.
   1. Postifx master.cf, main.cf
   2. Dovecot
   3. Amavis
   4. OpenDkim
   5. Named
   6. Fresh Clam
   7. PhpMyAdmin (config.inc.php, phpMyAdmin.conf in /etc/httpd/conf.d)
   8. Yum Repos for refence (these may be modified or erased)
   9. Fail2Ban
   10. IpTables
   11. MariaDB config files
   12. Any other critical service, especially something ISPConfig uses.
4. Note all PHP packages if you use PHP 8.x. The leapp upgrade to Alma Linux 8.10 gave me PHP 7.x, so I had to remove it and upgrade to PHP 8.2 after. See Cautions below.

CAUTION:

1. Run ]# leapp preupgrade multiple times
   Address any "inhibitor" errors. If you don't fix these, the upgrade won't run.
2. When you run ]# leapp upgrade, take note of any errors stopping the upgrade process.
   You may need to remove some packages from your system, particularly when moving from CentOS 7.9 to Alma Linux 8.x
3. Execute the upgrade using a IPMI KVM interface.
   You may need to interact with the boot menu. This isn't possible with an ordinary terminal.
4. Some packages you've installed that are *newer* than what's in the Alma Linux repos will break the upgrade.
   I installed MariaDB 11.x on my CentOS server. This broke the upgrade process causing me to restore the entire server. Alma Linux 8.x comes with MariaDB 10.x.
   Solution: Remove MariaDB 11.x before the leapp upgrade, then delete the 10.x version and install 11.x again. You may need to do a mariadb-secure-installation and then interact in safe mode in case you lost your root privileges.
5. Alma Linux 8.x comes with PHP 7.4. If you're using PHP 8.x on your CentOS 7.9 server, you'll need to remove it and reinstall 8.x using the remi repo.
6. Remove old OS packages. Remove old el7 packages upon upgrading to Alma Linux 8, and then all el8 packages when upgrading to Alma Linux 9.
7. Reinstall epel, remi, mariadb, phpmyadmin repos. These might get deleted during the upgrade.

There are a few good tutorials on how the leapp upgrade works, use at your own risk.

The only bugs I see with ISPConfig 3 are related to PHP 8 undefined indexes on the command line. Otherwise it runs fine so far.

 

Hi Till,
I saw these after I upgraded to PHP 8.2 on my CentOS 7.9 machine when I ran the ispconfig_update.sh script.

To be clear, I don't see them while operating ISPConfig on Alma Linux 9.4.

 

Certainly, and thank you for maintaining this wonderful software!

 

If there is not too much of a hassle, RHEL and its derivatives CentOS, Alma and Rocky could be supported, but I guess the maintenance might be quite troublesome, so since we already have tutorial for CentOS version 8.x, preferably another manual tutorial for their version 9.x?

Or is there a plan in work to support it via ISPConfig autoinstaller?

 

Can't speak for the autoinstaller, but I believe modifying the Cent OS 8 "Perfect Server" with notations for each OS would work. The following website has a nice list of OS compatibility by package name: https://pkgs.org/