Migration NS 7 to NS 8

Feature
,
#1

I know migration to NS 8 is not a current matter of interest (I read a little about NS 8 but doesn’t have a clear idea on what tecnically will be NS 8), but I am searching some confirmation…
Situation: I need to develop today a couple of small servers (File, mail, …), that have to last for at least 5 years.
NS7 is CentOS 7 based, so it is almost EOL and standard packages are old.
The packages provided by NS are updated, so it can still be a good option.
In 1-2 year I suppose we have NS 8 (Debian?, RH*?, …? based).
There will be a safe migration path that mantain configuration and data (via backup/restore I suppose)?

Thanks, P.

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#2

Yes, there will. Migrating to the next major release is a primary goal, as always has been.

Developers will work hard to make it really safe and painless.

That’s possible, however other approaches could be possible too.

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#3

Which other?
I suppose an in place standard OS upgrade (Debian style), isn’t a probable option. :wink:

Usual request: is there a place where a user can look for being updated on the NS 8 development without reading tons of messages? :wink:
Thanks, P.

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#4

…well by now we have just development channels. If you don’t like tons of messages, you already found the right place: relevant news are posted on this community.

1. In-place upgrade
we have to look at CentOS 7 as starting point, so Debian can’t help. For sure there’s no official in-place procedure to upgrade CentOS 7 to CentOS Stream 9. This sounds bad, but resembles the situation of upgrading CentOS 6 to 7. We just have the upstream project (Leapp) to make experiments.

I can’t predict how much it is difficult to implement, but it is sysadmin friendly because has few requirements.

2. Sync upgrade
Moving data from a NS7 system straight to NS8. The config translation can run on NS7 (I’m thinking about e-smith libraries…) and transferred to NS8.

Less network band, less downtime than restore, but two machines are needed at the same time.

3. Restore upgrade
This might seem obvious, but effectively it’s not less challenging than the other two: implement a NS8 restore procedure that starts from a NS7 backup.

It allows restoring on the same machine.

4. …
New ideas are welcome

I think our goal should be to implement 2 at first, then 1 or 3.

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