Do I need to upgrade the CentOS operating system version as well?

[Shawn Quinn]

I'm new to the systems admin tasks associated with my university's instance of Confluence.  I've read through the release notes, but it's not clear to me whether I need to upgrade CentOS first before doing the Confluence upgrades or whether the CentOS ' supporting OS is also included automatically in the product, such that the upgrade includes both the OS and the Confluence product along with it?

This clarification would be much appreciated.  

Thanks,

Shawn

[Robert Wen_Cprime_ · Accepted solution]

According to the supported platforms page, Linux distributions and versions are pretty broad.  The only time I would see about upgrading the OS would be if you need to switch from 32-bit to 64-bit.

What is the current version of CentOS and Confluence you have now?

[Shawn Quinn]

The Linux version is CentOS6.10 ; the confluence version is 6.15.4

We have to upgrade the operating system because of security concerns regarding the older versions of CentOS.  My institution is undecided about which version of Linux to use going forward because of the recent announcements about CentOS.  (They want to pick a new 'standard' that all of our groups would then have to use)

So ...seeing as CentOS is end of life, and Confluence on-prem not being supported for much longer, it's not clear what to upgrade to and whether I'll be able to get support for migrating my database to another OS such as Ubuntu.  We're not ready to move to the cloud yet because the instance we have has too much old gunk in it, like old user accounts , etc that will take a long time to sort through.  And I don't think we have the budget either for taking on new monthly recurring costs.

[Shawn Quinn]

On that topic, hopefully you can link me the most appropriate support and how-to pages for this project.

[Robert Wen_Cprime_]

If you have to stay on Confluence server for a long while, I would recommend upgrading Confluence first so you have a better migration path to Cloud.  Detailed upgrade guide is here: https://confluence.atlassian.com/doc/upgrading-confluence-4578.html

Hope this helps

[Shawn Quinn]

hi Robert ,

Thanks for that info.  It is helpful.  My plan is to upgrade on the existing CentOS server and then figure out whether to migrate to ubuntu in our own data center for a year or two, or dump straight to cloud now.  

In the meantime, I have read the documentation but I'm not clear on how to run the Linux installer for the new version.  I went through the instructions and they are a bit vague.  Do I upload the installer to my server with FTP or something like that?  Or is there a way to do all of this through the web interface?

[Robert Wen_Cprime_]

I get the installer manually by attaching the command through cURL.

curl -L -O https://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence/downloads/binary/atlassian-confluence-7.13.0.bin

If that fails, you'd have to go to the URL using the web browser on your server, and find the version and download the installer. 

[Shawn Quinn]

After thinking about this more, my new plan is to create a new VM, install a brand new LTS OS such as windwos server or Ubuntu ; then install the confluence fresh on there, then using the expoert and import data utuility to just migrate that way.

Do you think that would work, or are there show-stoppers i would run into doing it that way?

[Robert Wen_Cprime_]

This sounds like you're keeping the database where it is (the DB is separate from Confluence?)

Overall this looks like a good plan.