Change OS?

[Awalsh]

Anyone know if its a "relatively" easy thing to change O/S on a VPS? I see Jag support Debian and was wondering if anyone has had their VPS O/S changed and could tell me how smooth it went and if they had any problems.

Never knew Jag supported Debian, so if it seems to be a fairly easy process i might ask Jag to change the O/S but if its likely to be a pain ill keep it as CentOS

Obviously there will be downtime etc

Thanks

Andrew

[jason]

The safest way to do it would be to back up your data, wipe the (virtual) drive, install the new OS, install all software again, recreate accounts and then restore the data. Best case you'll be down for a couple hours. More probable: at least a day. Even once you're back up there is no guarantee that everything you used to have will play nice with the new OS. If, for example, some script wants to run the "widget" program which it thinks is in /usr/bin/widget and the new OS has that in /bin/widget it will break.

If you don't have any client accounts or mission critical apps on your VPS and you don't mind a period of down time and repair time then go for it and chage the OS. If you have client that rely on your server then I'd caution you against doing it.

--Jason

[Spathiphyllum]

...Best case you'll be down for a couple hours.

Holy cow! That does sound optimistic.

[JPC-Greg]

The only way to change Os is really to wipe the vps or just start a fresh one and move over to it.

[Awalsh]

contacted support to see if i can switch from CentOS and Cpanel to Debian and Plesk, I like debian more than CentOS. Dont ask me why i didnt ask for it to be setup like this 7 months ago when i got the VPS, was a little rushed when i got it because my previous provider just died overnight. I hope im not causing too much trouble :s,

Im not afraid of a little downtime, its not exactly "mission critical" stuff on it anyway, mostly friends blogs etc, nothing that cant deal with a little downtime. I mean considering its been up for the past 7 months with NO downtime i think the people who i host blog's (about 5 people) for can deal with a day or so.

Hoping to be all swapped over by Tuesday, its been forwarded to sales apparently because of the swap of cpanel to plesk. Im hoping Tuesday is realistic

Thanks for the replies

Andrew

[tank]

keep in mind sales doesn't work weekends so be sure the ticket isn't just waiting around for them till Monday morning. Maybe Sales does have to approve everything but I don't know.

[Awalsh]

its probably the fact i want to change to plesk, obviously there is going to have to be some kind of change of license in order for my VPS to run Plesk. My only reason to request plesk is apparently Cpanel is an absolute pain to get working on debian (doesnt really bother me what control panel i use, i mostly use ssh but some people who i host blog's for just like the whole control panel feel). Im still shocked at the whole Cpanel 3 year beta thing, oh well

If cpanel worked ok with Debian i wouldnt mind keeping Cpanel, but i guess i started something now


Andrew

[Awalsh]

Finally decided to stay with CentOS, sure i like Debian but im not in the mood for wrestling with Cpanel over it. After all its just a distro.

Argh, i must of caused so much hassle and been such a waste of time. Sorry support staff, i really should of made my mind up before contacting support.

Andrew

[Vin DSL]

Finally decided to stay with CentOS, sure i like Debian but im not in the mood for wrestling with Cpanel over it...

I 'cut my teeth' on Debian, and liked it just fine, but couldn't get past the language barrier. At that time, everybody in the Debian community was a knot-headed Kraut, or worse -- from Nor-dick contries. So, I settled on Slackware (for personal sites, here at the house). BSD is still #1 in my book...

Debian is still *hot* though! I think Debian is rated #2 on Netcraft... hold on...

Yep!

http://news.netcraft.com/archives/20...or_debian.html

Mind like a steel trap!

[tank]

I believe that Jag has some options to port cPanel to some other softwares. Interworx comes to mind. I've been thinking about it due to Apache 2 support but really haven't researched it enough. I am very dis-satisfied with cPanels relaease dates for software.

[Awalsh]

Apache 2 on cpanel annoys me..... I mean how long has Apache 2 been stable? Its been stable for quite a while, and then didnt they say PHP5 and Apache 2 should not be used with each other. (Even though countless people have got it working easy....)

Also does anyone else think WHM is slow? I mean i look at Plesk and its a lot faster (i know theres about a dozen factors which could mean this but on the whole)