A client recently asked my company to help them convert Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.11 and 6.8 to the comparable versions of CentOS. Before I present the scripts I wrote to automate this process, I believe that there is a lot of value in a RHEL subscription and better yet, Red Hat employs full-time kernel developers who submit patches and updates to the Linux open source project. In effect, supporting Red Hat indirectly supports the development of Linux as an operating system.
That being said, CentOS has full binary compatibility with RHEL and the only difference is that RHEL-specific logos and artwork are not present in CentOS. On the Internet there are lots of blog posts on converting from RHEL to CentOS but many of these guides are incomplete or provide incorrect information. In order to save others the trial-and-error required to fine-tune this process, I am sharing the scripts I wrote to automate the conversion process. For the purposes of this post, I will be converting RHEL 5.11 and 6.8 to Cent 5.11 and 6.8 but the process applies to all 5.X and 6.X versions.
Step 1
Generate a baseline of all packages from the RHEL installation DVD. The script I wrote takes one parameter, the path to the installation iso mount point and outputs a text file that can be compared with the local output of rpm -qa (which lists all packages currently installed on a RHEL system).
Step 2
Generate a list of packages which differ from the baseline packages on the RHEL installation ISO. This step is necessary because when you do the RHEL to CentOS conversion, packages will be updated to stock CentOS package versions. If you have some errata packages installed on your RHEL system, these will be updated to stock CentOS package versions. Therefore you need to generate a list of local packages which differ from the rpm's on the RHEL installation DVD/iso.
RHEL 5.X only supports Python 2.4.3, so this is the Python version I wrote the script in. 2.4 was a new experience for me as I am accustomed to using the argparse module from Python 2.7.X instead of optparse. Also 2.4 doesn't support the file opening idiom with open(filename, 'r') as foo: ... instead you have to do something like
f = open(filename 'r')
...
f.close()
and remember to manually close file objects after opening them. Fortunately, Python 2.6.X which is used on RHEL 6.X, and Python 2.7.X which is used on RHEL 7.X are backwards-compatible with 2.4.X, so my script works fine on RHEL 6.X, too.
One issue I encountered when writing the Python script above is that rpm -qa on RHEL 5.X by default does not return the package architecture (i.e. i386, x86_64, i686). To also see package architecture you have to edit /usr/lib/rpm/macros and add the architecture field in the following format:
%_query_all_fmt %%{name}-%%{version}-%%{release}.%%{arch}
Fortunately, this is the default on RHEL 6.X so this setting only needs to be changed for RHEL 5.X so you can compare the baseline rpm package list generated in Step 1 with rpm -qa in Step 2.
Step 3
Run the conversion scripts for RHEL 5.11 and RHEL 6.8. Note that before running the scripts you must have mounted the appropriate CentOS installation iso on a mount point which you will specify to the script as a parameter.
Here is the script for RHEL 5.X:
and here is the script for RHEL 6.X:
The big difference between RHEL 5.X and 6.X is that for 6.X you need to rebuild the initial ramdisk image to remove the RHEL progress bar at boot.
Note that the script edits entries in /boot/grub/grub.conf so that there will be no references to RHEL in the grub boot menu.
Step 4
Reboot the system and manually upgrade the packages highlighted by rhel-baseline-diff.py in the output file pkg-diff.txt (upgrading errata rpm's to equivalent CentOS versions will require you to separately download and install the relevant packages).
Questions and comments (especially about how to improve the scripts) are welcome!
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