As insiders know, the CentOS 7 operating system is set to kick the bucket on June 30th, to put it simply. Right now, admins of numerous servers running this OS are seriously worried about what to do.

My Plesk server has been running on CentOS 7 for many years. And now, for poor souls like me, Plesk has rolled out a special script to convert Plesk servers on CentOS 7 to the modern OS AlmaLinux 8 without losing the functionality of your Plesk and all its contents. It’s time for me to start converting my Plesk server, which only has 4 sites, two of which are on WordPress, and about six mailboxes that I actively use. Everything should have gone smoothly. But it didn’t.

The first stage of conversion after running the script resulted in a dependency error for the libwebp7 package. I fixed it and everything should have been fine, but when I ran the script again, it suddenly turned out that the MariaDB server was missing. The script just somehow removed it from the server and forgot to put it back.

# ./centos2alma
Do preparation checks...exec: "mysql": executable file not found in $PATH

I put a lot of effort into getting the MariaDB service back in place. And not just in place, but with the latest version 10.6, because version 10.2, for example, flatly refused to start. In general, I was ready to roll back the VPS snapshot, and I didn’t believe that the Plesk database and site databases survived after my diligent digging in the command line. But in the end, I managed to start MariaDB 10.6 and run the conversion script again. In general, I advise you to take care of updating your database server in advance before starting the conversion.

The script ran successfully again, the server was not accessible via ssh for about 15 minutes, something scary was happening on it beyond my control. But then it rebooted a couple more times and became available. Lo and behold, Plesk came to life, but the sites and mail did not work. The phase of eliminating post-conversion consequences began. It was very tedious and not easy; I had to turn on my Plesk and Linux skills to the max. In the end, the sites are working now, and so is the mail. But there are still some problems that I will fix later. The main thing is that the server is now running on AlmaLinux 8 and the latest version of Plesk.

In short, what I want to say. CentOS 7 server admins, prepare for hell 👹