There are somethings that you just never get round to, my nagios box was still running whitebox linux, and I’ve finally gotten round “upgrading” it to CentOS… yeah ok, upgrade is arguable, but you get my point.
First off a warning: Don’t do this ! All the documentation, for CentOS, RHEL, Fedora, any redhat linux all say, clean installs are the best way, and upgrades are not advised…. therefore I offer no support or warranty that this will work, in fact, I you advise you to read this post, but step away from your consoles !
But, if you think it might be a laugh, the centos documentation is a bit old, and not 100% correct, so here is what I did. First up (as root – obviously), clear out your yum cache,and install the CentOS gpg key.
yum clean all rpm --import http://mirror.centos.org/centos/RPM-GPG-KEY-CentOS-4
Next, install some base centos packages, take not that some need to be forced on
rpm -Uvh --nodeps http://mirror.centos.org/centos/4.4/os/i386/CentOS/RPMS/centos-release-4-4.2.i386.rpm rpm -ivh http://mirror.centos.org/centos/4.4/os/i386/CentOS/RPMS/python-elementtree-1.2.6-4.2.1.i386.rpm rpm -ivh http://mirror.centos.org/centos/4.4/os/i386/CentOS/RPMS/python-sqlite-1.1.7-1.2.i386.rpm rpm -ivh http://mirror.centos.org/centos/4.4/os/i386/CentOS/RPMS/sqlite-3.3.3-1.2.i386.rpm rpm -Uvh --force http://mirror.centos.org/centos/4.4/os/i386/CentOS/RPMS/python-urlgrabber-2.9.8-2.noarch.rpm rpm -Uvh --nodeps http://mirror.centos.org/centos/4.4/os/i386/CentOS/RPMS/yum-2.4.3-1.c4.noarch.rpm
finally remove the whitebox rpm db.
rpm -ev rpmdb-whitebox
Move any “whitebox” mirrors still in /etc/yum.repos.d and
yum install rpmdb-CentOS
Once you have that sorted, you can complete the upgrade with
yum update reboot
& cross your fingers 
If you come across the following warnings while using yum: Warning, could not load sqlite, falling back to pickle , I found…
yum install python-sqlite
Fixed the problem. And there we have it, all my boxes are now running CentOS – yay – just in time to look at the CentOS 5 upgrade
Dependency Problems ?
If a whitebox rpm is newer than the CentOS one, it won’t get upgraded, this might cause problems when installing new packages via yum. To solve the problem download the rpm manually from http://www.centos.org/modules/tinycontent/index.php?id=13 and force an upgrade
rpm --force -Uvh Something-CentOS.rpm
UPDATE: If you’re using something like Root Kit Hunter, you will notice a load of md5 hashes fail, these are whitebox rpm’s that didn’t need upgrading, to correct the problem you need to replace these with CentOS versions.. example rkhunter output:
/sbin/init [ BAD ]
Find which rpm, init belongs to
# rpm -q --whatprovides /sbin/init SysVinit-2.85-34.3
and upgrade it
wget http://www.mirrorservice.org/sites/mirror.centos.org/4.4/os/i386/CentOS/RPMS/SysVinit-2.85-34.3.i386.rpm rpm --force -Uvh SysVinit-2.85-34.3.i386.rpm
as soon as I’ve got one, I’ll get the rpms built, in the mean time please see 