CentOS to RHEL

Last year Red Hat announced the end of classic CentOS, shortening support for v8 — see here. If your system runs v8, you have until 2024, though the situation with the final version isn't very cheerful. One option is migrating to CentOS Stream. Where I see the catch is a higher degree of instability. CentOS was a good compromise between the conservative RHEL and the bleeding-edge Fedora. You had confidence that updates wouldn't break things every time.

Since the OCI I use only had CentOS 7 available for a while, waiting another three years doesn't make sense. Time to migrate! I didn't consider CentOS Stream and went straight for RHEL. I have a Developer Subscription for Individuals so I'll use it. There's a useful tool called convert2rhel and the migration process is well documented in this article.

In brief: update the system, restart, download convert2rhel, run it, and wait. In my case there was a snag with registration (I had an old record from my NÚKIB days — I'd been prepping the machine for Locked Shields), but support cleared everything and it worked. The system registered, swapped the packages, and all that was left was a restart. Done! The whole thing took about an hour (1 CPU and 1 GB RAM, so not exactly a powerhouse).

After the migration I verified everything was running as it should. Only downside is that the tool doesn't support migration from ARM64.