Known Blockers

The following is a list of install states which the script will intentionally prevent you from upgrading with. This is because the script cannot garantuee a successful upgrade with these conditions in place.

Basic checks

The following conditions are assumed to be in place any time you run this script:

You have CentOS 7.9 or greater installed.
- We DO NOT support alternative RHEL 7 (including CloudLinux) variants.
You have cPanel version 102 or greater installed.
You are logged in as root.

Disk space

At any given time, the upgrade process may use at or more than 5 GB. If you have a complex mount system, we have determined that the following areas may require disk space for a period of time:

/boot: 120 MB
/usr/local/cpanel: 1.5 GB
/var/lib: 5 GB

Unsupported software

The following software is known to lead to a corrupt install if this script is used. We block elevation when it is detected:

cPanel CCS Calendar Server - Requires Postgresql < 10.0
Postgresql - ELevate upgrades you to Postgresql 10.x which makes it impossible to downgrade to a 9.x Postgresql.

Things you need to upgrade first.

You can discover many of these issues by downloading elevate-cpanel and running /scripts/elevate-cpanel --check. Below is a summary of the major blockers people might encounter.

distro is up to date
- We expect yum update to indicate there is nothing to do.
- Mitigation: yum update
cPanel is up to date
- You will need to be on a version mentioned in the “Latest cPanel & WHM Builds (All Architectures)” section at http://httpupdate.cpanel.net/
- Mitigation: /usr/local/cpanel/scripts/upcp
nameserver
- cPanel provides support for a myriad of nameservers. (MyDNS, nsd, bind, powerdns). On AlmaLinux 8 / Rocky 8, it is preferred that you always be on PowerDNS.
- Mitigation: /scripts/setupnameserver powerdns
MySQL
- 99% of existing AlmaLinux 8 / Rocky 8 cPanel installs end up with MySQL 8. We recommend you upgrade your MySQL to 8.0 if possible.
- MariaDB: If you have already switched to MariaDB, you have no way of reaching MySQL. Be sure you are on 10.3 or better before moving to AlmaLinux 8 / Rocky 8.
Some EA4 packages are not supported on AlmaLinux 8 / Rocky 8.
- Example: PHP versions 5.4 through 7.1 are available on CentOS 7 but not AlmaLinux 8 / Rocky 8. You would need to remove these packages before the upgrading to AlmaLinux 8 / Rocky 8. Doing so might impact your system users. Proceed with caution.
The system must be able to control the boot process by changing the GRUB2 configuration.
- The reason for this is that the framework which performs the upgrade of distro-provided software needs to be able to run a custom early boot environment (initrd) in order to safely upgrade the distro.
- We check for this by seeing whether the kernel the system is currently running is the same version as that which the system believes is the default boot option.
Your machine has multiple network interface cards (NICs) using kernel-names (ethX).
- Since ethX style names are automatically assigned by the kernel, there is no guarantee that this name will remain the same upon upgrade to a new kernel version tier.
- The “default” approach in network-scripts config files of specificying NICs by DEVICE can cause issues due to the above.
- A more in-depth explanation of why this is a problem (and what to do about it) can be found at freedesktop.org.
- One way to prevent these isssues is to assign a name you want in the configuration and re-initialize NICs ahead of time.

Other Known Issues

The following is a list of other known issues that could prevent your server’s successful elevation.

Using OVH proactive intervention monitoring

If you are using a dedicated server hosted at OVH, you should disable the proactive monitoring before starting the elevation process. The proactive monitoring incorrectly detects an issue on your server during one of the reboots. Your server would then boot to a rescue mode, interrupting the elevation upgrade.