Unable to migrate centos 6.1 server to locally hosted VM

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champweller
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Joined: 2021/02/16 13:06:59

Unable to migrate centos 6.1 server to locally hosted VM

Post by champweller » 2021/02/16 13:40:16

I have a customer that has a centos 6.1 wordpress server sitting in bluehost. They would like us to starting hosting the server for them.

I have ran dd and sent the image over SSH to my location. I can see all the data in the image.

I then used qemu-utils to convert the image to a vmdk.

ESXI refuses to even power a VM on when the vmdk is attached in anyway.

VirtualBox will power on but it will not boot to the VMDK.

I have tried building a centos server and manually copying the system over but that is just taking way to long and since I can't using esxi to do this I don't have any horsepower to copy it over either. (I would like to install rsync but I am having issues with this)

I have repaired the vmdk using gparted. gparted is unable to add the boot flag to this VMDK.

I have tried using the cent0s 6.1 install disc to "upgrade" the system in hopes that I can reinstall the bootloader but the installer crashes when I try to to do this.

Is there anyone that could help me get this working?

Thanks!!!

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TrevorH
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Location: Brighton, UK

Re: Unable to migrate centos 6.1 server to locally hosted VM

Post by TrevorH » 2021/02/16 14:08:15

You're not going to like the answer but I think you would be better off abandoning that install entirely.

CentOS 6.1 was based on the RHEL 6.1 release that came out in 2011-05-19. It has not been supported since the release of 6.2 in 2011-12-06. You've had NO security updates applied to that machine in the last 10 years and the chances are that it is already compromised - especially since you say it's running a wordpress install which is one of the worst products for security vulnerabilities that there is.

Install a new CentOS 7 (supported until 2024) or CentOS Stream (until much the same date) and then install your application and then restore your data to it.

CentOS 6.1 is not safe. CentOS 6.1 running wordpress is almost certainly already not your system, it belongs to whoever broke into it first.
The future appears to be RHEL or Debian. I think I'm going Debian.
Info for USB installs on http://wiki.centos.org/HowTos/InstallFromUSBkey
CentOS 5 and 6 are deadest, do not use them.
Use the FAQ Luke

champweller
Posts: 2
Joined: 2021/02/16 13:06:59

Re: Unable to migrate centos 6.1 server to locally hosted VM

Post by champweller » 2021/02/16 14:56:08

I will give it a go and see if the customer cares that we are using centos 7. However, I am still open to solutions in case the customer does not want to use centos7.

Thanks for the info!

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TrevorH
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Posts: 33191
Joined: 2009/09/24 10:40:56
Location: Brighton, UK

Re: Unable to migrate centos 6.1 server to locally hosted VM

Post by TrevorH » 2021/02/16 18:45:14

Also notice the big red bit in my signature about CentOS 6 being dead. Whatever you do now, you need to be moving off CentOS 6 as there will never be any more security updates for it. Not that it can get much worse than it already is but...
The future appears to be RHEL or Debian. I think I'm going Debian.
Info for USB installs on http://wiki.centos.org/HowTos/InstallFromUSBkey
CentOS 5 and 6 are deadest, do not use them.
Use the FAQ Luke

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