How to upgrade to CentOS Stream 9 from CentOS Stream 8

This article will show how to update to CentOS Stream 9 from CentOS Stream 8.

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If only official repositories are used it is fairly easy to upgrade to the new rolling based CentOS Stream 9 release, which follows the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9. Using unofficial or users’ repositories CentOS Stream 8 may lead to unstable system or break user’s system following this tutorial. First, check out for CentOS Stream 9 compatibility issues the currently installed repositories if some specific or unofficial are used.
The following article uses a CentOS Stream 9 with only the official default repositories and in addition, the EPEL repository, which has a CentOS Stream 9 support.
How to install – Network installation of CentOS Stream 9 (20220606.0) – minimal server installation with additional information about important CentOS Stream 9 URLs and links and what kind of software the user can expect to have Software and technical details of CentOS Stream 9 minimal install. Camparing the packages of the two systems – a clean install of CentOS Stream 9 and an upgrade from CentOS Stream 8, the clean install has 377 packages installed and the upgrade has 387 packages installed. The strated processes are the same except the chronyd service is not started on boot. chronyd daemon offers a time synchronization.

STEP 1) All installed packages should be updated to the latest versions.

[root@srv ~]# dnf update -y
Last metadata expiration check: 0:09:08 ago on Tue Oct  4 12:12:07 2022.
Dependencies resolved.
Nothing to do.
Complete!

The DNF tool reports that all packages are up-to-date, because there is nothing to upgrade.

STEP 2) A cleanup of all packages, which are not required anymore.

Check orphan and leaves packages. Some of the packages here may be used by the user explicitly, so it is important to know the system. Remove the packages if not used by the system and they are showed as an output of the following commands and they are not used by the user of the system.

[root@srv ~]# dnf repoquery --unneeded
Last metadata expiration check: 0:12:56 ago on Tue Oct  4 12:12:07 2022.
NetworkManager-initscripts-updown-1:1.40.0-1.el8.noarch
grub2-tools-efi-1:2.02-129.el8.x86_64
libmetalink-0:0.1.3-7.el8.x86_64
pciutils-0:3.7.0-1.el8.x86_64
python3-configobj-0:5.0.6-11.el8.noarch
python3-schedutils-0:0.6-6.el8.x86_64
rdma-core-0:41.0-1.el8.x86_64
[root@srv ~]# dnf repoquery --extras
Last metadata expiration check: 0:00:12 ago on Tue Oct  4 12:34:17 2022.

Remove the unneeded packages:
Keep on reading!

Unable to continue upgrading an old cacti 0.8.8 to the latest version 1.2.18

Upgrading an old instance of cacti monitoring software may become a challenge, because of multiple new recommendations and requirements for the latest version 1.2.x.
There are a couple of b recommendations like memory limit and maximum execution time and multiple plugin requirements, which if not fulfilled the setup cannot continue. Second, there are the MySQL recommendations and there is an option innodb_file_format, which in general, is recommended to be Barracuda, but by default, in older version of MySQL use Antelope!

Upgrading from CACTI version 0.8.8 is successful to CACTI version 1.2.3, but then the upgrade process just began restarting and failed to upgrade to the final target CACTI version 1.2.18 because of the old MySQL InnoDB table format – Antelope.

Despite the Barracuda is just recommended and the upgrade process continues through the steps of the setup wizard, it just suddenly stops and returns to the welcome install screen.
Setting the option innodb_file_format resolves the problem and the upgrade setup finishes successfully the upgrade from CACTI version 0.8.8 (apparently with an intermediate upgrade to CACTI version 1.2.3) to CACTI version 1.2.18.

innodb_file_format=barracuda

Probably, this option will be a mandatory MySQL option for upgrading to a newer CACTI version after 1.2.3.

Several screenshots of recommendations and requirements for upgrading to CACTI 1.2.28

Keep on reading!

Upgrading Ubuntu 18 to Ubuntu 20 – software versions upgrade table – head to head

In the following article a comparison between two LTS versions of Ubuntu is presented – Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic) versus Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (Focal). The latest version of Ubuntu 18.04 and Ubuntu 20.04 (17.06.2020) is used to generate the software versions below.

In the Desktop world upgrading to the new and latest version of a Linux distribution is almost mandatory, but in the server world, upgrading is more complicated. The first step in updating a server is to check what software versions come with the new distribution version and then check whether the running custom (application) software supports the software versions. For example, updating to a new distribution version, which comes with PHP 7.4, but the current application supports only 7.2 is not very wise and in addition, the current version may have years of support in the future.

Having a head-to-head version comparison to check is the main target of this article – a fast check of what version the user could expect from the new (aka latest) Linux distribution.

SoftwareUbuntu 20.04Ubuntu 18.04
Linux kernel



5.4.0
5.6.0
4.15.0
4.18.0
5.0.0
5.3.0
5.4.0
libc2.312.27
OpenSSL
1.1.1f
1.0.2n
1.1.1
GNU GCC


7.5.0
8.4.0
9.3.0
10-20200411
4.8.5
5.5.0
6.5.0
7.5.0
8.4.0
PHP7.47.2
Python2.7.17
3.8.2
2.7.15
3.6.7
Perl5.30.05.26.1
Ruby2.72.5.1
OpenJDK8u252-b09
11.0.7
13.0.3
14.0.1
8u252-b09
11.0.7
Go lang1.13.8
1.14.2
1.8
1.9
1.10
Rust1.41.01.41.0
llvm



6.0.1
7.0.1
8.0.1
9.0.1
10.0.0
3.7.1
3.9.1
4.0.1
5.0.1
6.0
7
8
9
10.0.0
nodejs10.19.08.10.0
Subversion1.131.9.7
Git2.25.22.17.1
Apache2.4.412.4.29
Nginx1.17.101.14.0
MySQL server8.0.205.7.30
MariaDB10.3.2210.1.44
PostgreSQL12.210.12
SQLite3.22.03.31.1
Xorg X server1.20.81.19.6
Gnome Shell3.36.23.28.4