LUKS encryption and CentOS 7 to AlmaLinux Upgrade?

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1

I am coming across an error when attempting to upgrade a physical Dell PowerEdge730 server on CentOS 7 to AlmaLinux using the in-place upgrade instructions that say to use ELevate. When I run a preupgrade though Leapp, I get an ‘Upgrade Inhibited’ error that says the following:

Upgrade has been inhibited due to the following problems:

  1. Inhibitor: LUKS encrypted partition detected

I’ve realized that the LUKS encryption is not able to be bypassed. However, my solutions from research are either:

  1. Remove the actor that’s preventing encryption (Update Alma/RHEL with leapp and LUKS | IT-Hure) similar to in this article

  2. Remove the LUKS encryption from the partitioned drive (which sounds more risky than the upgrade itself)

Or, do a clean OS install, which does erase what is on the server (I believe).

Has anyone had any success upgrading a LUKS encrypted CentOS 7 server to AlmaLinux?

2

I’ve just upgraded a production server after removing the actor that prevented encryption. I didn’t have any problem (at least with disk encrpytion :smiley: ).

I’m using Fedora Linux ever since on desktop and I used a encrypted key file for a long long time and did several upgrades with it. And I also fixed several things because of it…

Some more information:

  • The system is on LUKS version 1 with the defaults of the CentOS 7 installer (aes-xts-plain64 with sha256 hashing)
  • A key file is used for encrpytion during boot. I expected it not to work with the upgrade and it didn’t. So I entered a password manually. After the update the key file worked without any further ado using new Initramfs.