CentOS 5 will reach end of life officially on March 31st of 2017, but as an industry we are already feeling the pain of people still using the out of date OS. Trying to support a system on an aging Operating System is not that far from trying to live in an aging apartment building. Ill-fitting fixtures, flickering electricity, and malfunctioning plumbing are just some of the daily struggles in those old buildings. Similarly, when the basic requirements of modern hosting are a struggle to maintain it has a severe and direct impact on every webhost’s quality of life.
cPanel & WHM version 56 (in the CURRENT tier as of April 11th, 2016, with an expected End of Life of May of 2017) will be the last version of cPanel to support CentOS 5, and 32bit Architecture. We have considered this heavily, and have decided to drop support for those things for two primary reasons:
- As a software provider, the opportunity cost of continuing to support the oldest infrastructure is too high, and it severely limits the amount of new things we can deliver to our users.
- As an industry, cPanel believes making it easier for people to continue to host on old, insecure, out of date software ultimately hurts us all.
Deprecating support for older systems and older software is necessary for the over-all health of the hosting industry. cPanel is keeping its eye on the future, and letting the old software go. But we know how hard it traditionally is to migrate from an old server to a new one. To help with that we developed the Server Configuration addition to the transfer tool.
The Server Configuration Additions to the Transfer Tool
In version 11.44 we introduced the Transfer Tool, and it has proved a reliable tool to migrate accounts and packages between servers. As of v56 you can use it to transfer server configurations between servers as well.
Note: This is intended to be used to transfer configurations from an existing v56 server to a new server. No attempt is made to back up configurations on the destination server. Additionally, this tool is not intended to be used to migrate configurations from compromised servers.
If you’re familiar with the transfer tool, you will find that the additions we’ve made are incredibly simple to use. Once you authenticate to the origin server, you’ll see an expandable section called “Service Configurations”. Click the ‘Show’ button:
Choose the configurations you want to transfer, and go through the Transfer Tool like you normally would:
The configurations are moved to the new server, any relevant services are restarted, and you’re all set! The same team that built this interface also expanded the functionality of the cpconftool, to help you complete a similar migration on the command line. The cpconftool a command line utility that operates in a very similar way to pkgacct. You can read more about it on our documentation site.
You can find the full documentation about the additions to the Transfer Tool in the Transfer Tool Documentation for v56.
Note: Due to the potential complications involved, currently MySQL is not included in the WHM Transfer Tool interface. You can still copy your MySQL configuration using the command line tool cpconftool, you can still back up and manually copy your MySQL configuration
