CentOS 8 to Almalinux in place upgrade Error

[thowden]

Hi All

I have multiple CPanel DNS only servers all based on CentOS 8.x and this morning in a fit of excitement I saw the prompt to upgrade to Almalinux in order to avoid the impending doom of CentOS deprecation.

Simple enough, follow the bouncing ball instruction set at How to Convert from CentOS 8 to AlmaLinux OS 8 | cPanel & WHM Documentation

Ok. All that seemed to go ok, although there was an error reported on /tmp directory being read-only, but I figured I'll reboot and address that separately.

Oops! Server is now cactus. Boots to Emergency Mode, except that the cursor is flashing and no shell access is available.

Thinking at this stage that the /tmp error was more important than I gave it credit for. I can recover, it is not critical, but given that all of my servers are in the same environment, all cloned from a single source, the likelihood is that they will all fail in the same way.

So my question is why did the Almalinux upgrade fail with /tmp as read-only ?

Pretty sure it is a grub related issue.

Thanks for any input.

 

[cPanelAnthony]

Hello! I'm not sure why /tmp itself would be read-only on your host. However, if it is read only, and there was no place for temporary data like session files to go, there could definitely be serious issues. The following article might help.

 

[thowden]

Hi

Comparing to my other DNS Only servers:

#ls -la
drwxrwxrwt. 42 root root 12288 Dec 8 21:13 tmp

Is the apparent default setting(s) and the failed server would have no reason to be any different as it was cloned from the same source.

Which says /tmp was not read-only from a system perspective, but apparently was for the Almalinux upgrade ?

The documentation suggested is based on the premise that we have identified disk corruption of some description that has led /tmp to become read-only.

In turn, /tmp is used daily by the system and if, on my failed server, it were read-only, then surely the server would not have been functioning or had some other errors manifest and not just impact an upgrade.

Similarly, if there is an inherent issue, I'd expect my other servers to also exhibit some error and all checks show as ok.

So I am left with /tmp having a physical failure triggering 'read-only' specifically for Almalinux upgrade.

Hmmmm......

I will pursue a test platform.

 

[FrankD]

Hi

I got this error

Last metadata expiration check: 0:11:03 ago on Fri 24 Dec 2021 10:52:10 AM PST.
Error:
Problem 1: package libstdc++-devel-8.5.0-4.el8_5.alma.x86_64 requires libstdc++(x86-64) = 8.5.0-4.el8_5.alma,but none of the providers can be installed
- cannot install both libstdc++-8.5.0-4.el8_5.alma.x86_64 and libstdc++-8.5.0-4.el8_5.x86_64
- cannot install the best update candidate for package libstdc++-devel-8.5.0-4.el8_5.x86_64
- cannot install the best update candidate for package libstdc++-8.5.0-4.el8_5.x86_64
Problem 2: libgcc-8.5.0-4.el8_5.alma.i686 has inferior architecture
- package gcc-8.5.0-4.el8_5.alma.x86_64 requires libgcc >= 8.5.0-4.el8_5.alma, but none of the providers canbe installed
- cannot install both libgcc-8.5.0-4.el8_5.alma.x86_64 and libgcc-8.5.0-4.el8_5.x86_64
- cannot install the best update candidate for package libgcc-8.5.0-4.el8_5.x86_64
- cannot install the best update candidate for package gcc-8.5.0-4.el8_5.x86_64
Problem 3: libgomp-8.5.0-4.el8_5.alma.i686 has inferior architecture
- package gcc-8.5.0-4.el8_5.alma.x86_64 requires libgomp = 8.5.0-4.el8_5.alma, but none of the providers canbe installed
- cannot install both libgomp-8.5.0-4.el8_5.alma.x86_64 and libgomp-8.5.0-4.el8_5.x86_64
- package gcc-c++-8.5.0-4.el8_5.alma.x86_64 requires gcc = 8.5.0-4.el8_5.alma, but none of the providers canbe installed
- cannot install the best update candidate for package libgomp-8.5.0-4.el8_5.x86_64
- cannot install the best update candidate for package gcc-c++-8.5.0-4.el8_5.x86_64
(try to add '--allowerasing' to command line to replace conflicting packages or '--skip-broken' to skip uninstallable packages or '--nobest' to use not only best candidate packages)
Run dnf distro-sync -y. Exit code: 1

What can I do?

 

[cPanelAnthony]

Hello! rpmup is essential 'dnf upgrade -y'. You are getting the error because you have both CentOS and AlmaLinx repos enabled. You should disable the CentOS repos, then run 'dnf clean all; dnf distro-sync --nobest' to replace all the CentOS packages with the AlmaLinux packages.

How do I enable or disable a repository?

 

[sajithgsm]

Alma Linux is now officially fully supported with cPanel/WHM?

 

[quietFinn]

Yes it is:

https://support.cpanel.net/hc/en-us/articles/1500001216582-What-operating-systems-are-supported-by-cPanel-