O.K. That’s probably what I have to do then. I really do hope it works. It just took me 2 months, various upgrade attempts, countless debugging hours, to upgrade from 4.2 to 4.3, just discovering at least two more issues/bugs.
So considering that, I am worried that the backup/restore project takes me a year until it actually works. Even the docs are extremely limited on how to restore on a different system:
Restoring Foreman server or Smart Proxy server from a Backup
If the original system is unavailable, provision a system with the same configuration settings and host name.
So what are those “same configuration settings”? And using the same hostname is kind of difficult as I cannot really shutdown everything for a longer time…
Just thinking about how I can set up the new system in parallel to the old one in production causes me headache, e.g. hostnames and names in certificates etc. I also have 1 TB for /var/lib/pulp. As far as I understand the backup process, it will backup the content of that and then restore it. So I have 1 TB on the old server, 1 TB in the backup, and 1 TB on the destination. And everything is going to be copied twice. For content which is 99,9% available online anyway. --skip-pulp-content is only for debugging purposes, so it seems copying the pulp content manually before or even simply using cloning the vdi and attaching it to the new server isn’t an option.
So I am really worried that this is going to be a major operation and in the end I will only wonder if it hadn’t be better simply to start all over again. I have 31 products, ~120 repositories, 4 content views, 275 hosts with parameters set, individual subscriptions and enabled repositories sets. Manually setting this up on a new server takes a lot of time, but if backup/restore would take longer in the end, causing much more problems it might be worth it… Of course, it’s futile to assume how long something will really take…
I don’t really like that. Over the time foreman collected so much garbage on the system that I really don’t want to convert the system in-place to CentOS 8. If I run yum autoremote it wants to remove more than 200 packages. I don’t want to keep all that garbage and I don’t feel comfortable what is going to happen with this after the conversion…
Well, extracting all the data manually is more complicated… Using hammer to extract the information about my 120 repositories, converting it into a form that ansible get take. I mean it’s only a limited amount of information that there is.
And if I simply set up a new system I have to get this information out of the old system anyway, even if it would be a simple click/copy/paste…
So either way, this is already causing me headache and sleepless nights, and I really don’t know what’s the best way to go without wasting too much time…