May 18, 2011

Successfully migrated to OpenRC

I just migrated all of my systems to OpenRC, one of them entirely remotely (ssh). It works, and here are my tips for successful migration (mostly basic):

  1. Remember to use screen or tmux to avoid problems when the network connection breaks temporarily.
  2. Make sure to run dispatch-conf (recommended) or etc-config (only if you're still using it) carefully and completely (update all files). If in doubt, just run it again, it will exit immediately if there's nothing to update.
  3. Read the OpenRC migration guide. Don't glance over it, make sure to read every sentence carefully.
  4. Before doing the update in production, make sure to test the upgrade procedure in a non-production environment.
Now here's one thing that may be easy to miss: your /etc/conf.d/net file will most likely require a manual update. Everything is described in the migration guide, the change is trivial. I'd rather not experiment what happens if you don't do that, but there is a real chance the system will just not bring up the network interfaces. Similarly, make sure that your net.eth0 etc services exist (ls -l /etc/init.d/net*) and will be started on boot (rc-status).

That should be it. Please report any problems to the Gentoo Bugzilla.