So Long CentOS, and Thanks For All the Fish!

So, I managed my own unnamed and generally unreferenced Linux server running CentOS (the astute might recall me talking about this little server and the whys of its existence from this old post). It had been alive since 2016 since I made that switch over, and was doing its job perfectly well on the CentOS 7 Linux distribution.

That is, until Red Hat basically told all of us CentOS users to go pound sand and be their beta testers, the same way Microsoft is making Windows 10+ as a continuously beta-tested platform.

It was not ideal for my situation. I wouldn't have minded too much in shifting up to the CentOS Stream build, if not for the fact that the upgrade path required going through CentOS 8 first, which ironically had reached its end-of-life in 2021-12-31, even as CentOS 7 was reaching its end-of-life in 2024-06-some day.

🤦

And so, I went back to the old faithful.

No, not Slackware, but good old Debian.

``But MT, why Debian? You've not used that sucker in years/at all, and isn't Ubuntu like the more updated downstream version?''

Well... yes. All that is true. But I don't need this little server to run the latest geegaws like Docker containers, GPU computations, or even a damn GUI desktop---it just needs to run Apache Subversion, and run it well.

That's literally it. And Debian is the granddaddy of being the most rocksteady Linux distribution out there, so what more can I ask for, after this confusing debacle that surrounds CentOS?

It took me a while to bring my old configuration over, but it was finally done, mostly without much incident. Running Debian 12 had the side effect of finally bringing my subversion server version up to 1.14.2, which gave me a chance to update the longest running repository of mine to a more compact and performant format. I also took the opportunity to switch over from the old RSA keys for HTTPS to something based on elliptic curves, with the key benefit of shrinking the key size by 16× without losing actual effective security.

All in all, it was not as harrowing as I thought it would be, and I was glad.

I've updated all the local repository references to point to this new server, and have decommissioned the original CentOS 7 one. Here's to a less painful maintenance process for the future.

Till the next update.