Switching From RHEL4 (RimuHosting Enterprise Linux 4) to Centos

Please note that CentOS4 is no longer supported so this document is officially deprecated. See http://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2011-December/018285.html for more information

RimuHosting build the RPMs for the RimuHosting EL4 distro (based on RedHat's source RPMs).

Due to the number of pending packages and the amount of testing that would be required to ensure there were no 'breakages' it has been a while since we have pushed up new RPMs to the RHEL4 repository.  Update: this repository (apt.rimuhosting.com) is no longer running, we strongly recommend the following process to insure continued security of your server. Please pop in a support ticket if you need a hand with this.

The first thing we highly recommend is updating the version of apt you are using. This will include much better dependency checking and will generally save you time fixing package issues later.

rpm -Uvh http://downloads.rimuhosting.com/apt-0.5.15lorg3.2-3.el4.rf.i386.rpm

The general fix is to switch to the CentOS4 repository. This repository is compatible with your RHEL4 packages. A number of users have made this change and it is working well. Minimal (just the extra/new/updated) package updates will be required after an apt-get update; apt-get upgrade.

The instructions are available in the VPS Management page in your Rimuhosting control panel. Please check the link here for up to date instructions! These are the most recent as of 2010-05-06, but check your errata page in case this page was not updated:

 2010-05-06 Use the CentOS4 apt repositories (more up to date). 
#
# WARNING: This will bring the VPS up to date with the CentOS4 
# repositories and disable services enabled by the new RPMs.
#
# If you are running a kernel earlier than 2.6.18.8, 
# you will need to upgrade your kernel before doing the dist-upgrade.
# Kernel 2.6.30.5 is known to work well with RHEL4/CentOS 4.x.
# Kernels can be changed via the control panel: https://rimuhosting.com/cp/vps/kernel.jsp
# 
# It is highly recommended that you ask us to take a backup of your VPS before doing the upgrade.
#
# 2008-11-12: Add GPG key and warning about kernel version
wget http://downloads.rimuhosting.com/RPM-GPG-KEY-CentOS-4
rpm --import RPM-GPG-KEY-CentOS-4
rm -f RPM-GPG-KEY-CentOS-4
if [ -e /etc/apt/sources.list ]; then
  mv /etc/apt/sources.list /etc/apt/sources.list.old-$(date +%s)
fi
echo "rpm http://vault.centos.org/ /4.9/apt/i386 os updates addons fasttrack extras
#rpm-src http://vault.centos.org/ /4.9/apt/i386 os updates addons fasttrack extras
#rpm http://vault.centos.org/ /4.9/apt/i386 centosplus contrib" > /etc/apt/sources.list
mv /lib/tls /lib/tls.old
apt-get update
apt-get -y upgrade
if [ $(rpm -qa | grep -ic glibc-2) -gt 1 ]; then
  # Remove duplicate glibc rpm
  rpm -qa | grep -i glibc-2 | sort | head -n1 | xargs rpm -e
fi
apt-get -y install centos-release
apt-get -y dist-upgrade
for i in netfs rawdevices saslauthd kudzu lvm2-monitor messagebus autofs haldaemon xfs; do chkconfig --del $i; done
rm -f /etc/apt/sources.list.d/centos.list

Mysql and Plesk

Add 'centosplus' to the sources above if you want to upgrade to mysql5.

Strange " error: Macro % has illegal name (%define) " messages

If you are getting this message ("error: Macro % has illegal name (%define)") when using RPM or apt-get/apt-cache, this is what we've done to fix it. Any of these would do:

1. Comment out the last line in /etc/rpm/macros.solve, or;
2. Remove the package rpmdb-rhel would also do the job, if you don't need that.

Note: the last line in /etc/rpm/macros.solve is:

%{NAME}-%{VERSION}-%{RELEASE}.%{ARCH}.rpm       /home/buildcentos/CENTOS/en/4.0/i386/CentOS/RPMS/%%{NAME}-%%{VERSION}-%%{RELEASE}.%%{ARCH}.rpm}

Please Note: if your VPS does not come back up after an upgrade please contact Support. There is a known bug which involves a kernel change on the VPS to fix. Its a 5 minute task if that for us to fix.