Finally on the last day of the year I migrated my Zoneminder CCTV/Plex physical server to Rocky Linux from CentOS 8 using the script from Rocky Linux https://docs.rockylinux.org/guides/migrate2rocky/ .  Came back from a trip to Costco saw a reference to Linux and ding hey I still need to migrate away from Centos 8 since it will no longer be supported after today. I checked from my Rocky Linux VM that Zoneminder was in the Rocky Linux repos, then did my last update at Centos 8 rebooted and started my Rocky Linux migration after downloading the files from the Rocky Linux GIT repositories.

I have been using Rocky Linux for a few months on one of my VM’s and it seems to be keeping pace with the updates and kernel versions out there. I don’t have a VM testing out Almalinux https://almalinux.org/ yet but it seems solid from everything I have seen and I may start using that as another long term stable CentOS 8 alternative as well. 

I currently am running Fedora 35 the latest version on my physical Linux workstation and will switch to Ubuntu on my older physical Linux workstation eventually to test out a few things. I have Windows 10 Workstation version on my other main physical workstation. I’ll switch my prior physical Windows 10 server over to gaming uses with a couple of other physical workstations I have but will make one a Linux gaming station as well. 

My servers are running various flavors of Red Hat from CentOS 7 to Rocky Linux 8.5, except one running Windows Datacenter 2019 on. I have CentOS Stream 8, different versions of Fedora and Rocky Linux in my XCP-ng virtual environment. I will reintroduce a VMWare ESXi server on one of my C7000 blade servers eventually once I have the time. I like the XCP-ng for most of my virtual systems as I can do my hardware migrations and server migrations without added costs of licenses or scripts unless I feel like paying. Then of course I’m running FreeNAS on my NAS of FreeBSD origins and will eventually move to TrueNAS Core still consisting of FreeBSD. May test out TrueNAS Scale at a later time which has Debian as the base OS.

That is an overall of OS’ in my environment with Rocky Linux forecast as my main stable OS from this point into the future. My Plex and Zoneminder came up just fine so now it’s on to the next project! 

Script checks your current repos, then packages plus runs updates all going quite smoothly (skipped to the end to miss all packages being updated and reinstalled) so you can see how painless the process is from a pure OS perspective absent of proprietary applications and other down time considerations of course.:

migrate2rocky - Begin logging at Fri 31 Dec 2021 02:16:31 PM PST.


Removing dnf cache
Preparing to migrate CentOS Linux 8 to Rocky Linux 8.

Determining repository names for CentOS Linux 8.....

Found the following repositories which map from CentOS Linux 8 to Rocky Linux 8:
CentOS Linux 8  Rocky Linux 8
appstream       appstream
baseos          baseos
extras          extras

Getting system package names for CentOS Linux 8..........

Found the following system packages which map from CentOS Linux 8 to Rocky Linux 8:
CentOS Linux 8        Rocky Linux 8
centos-logos-ipa      rocky-logos-ipa
centos-backgrounds    rocky-backgrounds
centos-gpg-keys       rocky-gpg-keys
centos-logos          rocky-logos
centos-indexhtml      rocky-indexhtml
centos-linux-release  rocky-release
centos-logos-httpd    rocky-logos-httpd
centos-linux-repos    rocky-repos

Getting list of installed system packages.

We will replace the following CentOS Linux 8 packages with their Rocky Linux 8 equivalents
Packages to be Removed  Packages to be Installed
centos-backgrounds      rocky-backgrounds
centos-gpg-keys         rocky-gpg-keys
centos-logos            rocky-logos
centos-indexhtml        rocky-indexhtml
centos-linux-release    rocky-release
centos-logos-httpd      rocky-logos-httpd
centos-linux-repos      rocky-repos


In addition to the above the following system packages will be removed:
centos-linux-release
centos-linux-release

Getting a list of enabled modules for the system repositories.

Excluding modules:
libselinux-python:2.8

Found the following modules to re-enable at completion:
container-tools:rhel8
httpd:2.4
javapackages-runtime:201801
llvm-toolset:rhel8
mariadb:10.3
nginx:1.14
perl-DBD-MySQL:4.046
perl-DBD-SQLite:1.58
perl-DBI:1.641
perl-IO-Socket-SSL:2.066
perl-libwww-perl:6.34
perl:5.26
php:7.2
python36:3.6
satellite-5-client:1.0
virt:rhel

Running dnf update before we attempt the migration.
Last metadata expiration check: 0:00:49 ago on Fri Dec 31 14:16:53 2021.
Dependencies resolved.
Nothing to do.
Complete!
Added rockyappstream repo from https://dl.rockylinux.org/pub/rocky/8/AppStream/x86_64/os/
Added rockybaseos repo from https://dl.rockylinux.org/pub/rocky/8/BaseOS/x86_64/os/
rockyappstream                                   19 MB/s | 8.7 MB     00:00
:

Complete!
Subscription Manager found on system.

If you're converting from a subscription-managed distribution such as RHEL then
you may no longer need subscription-manager or dnf-plugin-subscription-manager.
While it won't hurt anything to have it on your system you may be able to safely
remove it with:

"dnf remove subscription-manager dnf-plugin-subscription-manager".

Take care that it doesn't remove something that you want to keep.

The subscription-manager dnf plugin may be enabled for the benefit of
Subscription Management. If no longer desired, you can use
"subscription-manager config --rhsm.auto_enable_yum_plugins=0" to block this
behavior.
Some Subscription Manager certificates were restored to /etc/rhsm/ca after
migration so that the subscription-manager command will continue to work:

redhat-entitlement-authority.pem
redhat-uep.pem

If you no longer need to use the subscription-manager command then you may
safely remove these files.




Done, please reboot your system.

A log of this installation can be found at /var/log/migrate2rocky.log