---
categories:
  - 'Computer Magazines'
date: '2024-03-17 00:00:00 +0000'
title: 'New ADMIN Magazine Article: ELevate to the Future'
---

Today I want to announce the publication of an article that marks an 
important milestone in my career: **ELevate to the Future**. What makes 
this article different from the others I have written is that this one 
is an sponsored piece.

I am sure magazine readers are already familiar with sponsored 
articles, which are born when an external company pays the author to 
write about something the company cares about, under a positive light. 
Sponsored articles have a bad reputation because, if a for-profit 
company is calling the shots and paying the author to write good things 
about a product or service, how can the resulting article be 
trustworthy? Sponsored articles are a challenge to write because you 
need to write the truth, but you cannot be negative towards the sponsor.

The article deals with *ELevate*, a tool from the *Alma Linux* people 
which is designed to make migrating away from *CentOS* painless and 
easy. It also doubles up as an upgrade tool, compatible with the usual 
*Red Hat Enterprise Linux* clones. The article itself is available for 
free(!). *ELevate* is interesting because *Red Hat* derived 
distributions have traditionally been a pain to upgrade. Besides, 
*CentOS* is a sinking ship and many System Administrators need a plan 
out. I think using *ELevate* to migrate away from *CentOS* to *Alma 
Linux* is a reasonable proposition.

The biggest roadblock in writing this article was that *ELevate* was 
incapable of upgrading or migrating systems which used unofficial 
repositories, such as *EPEL*. This lack of core functionality is the 
sort of thing that **must** be mentioned in an honest article, but is 
hard to put in a sponsored piece because it makes the sponsor look bad, 
so I opted to include some workaround about the issue. Thankfully, the 
sponsor noticed this and decided to fix the issues on their end to 
*EPEL* was supported by *ELevate* and no negative points had to be 
raised by *Linux Magazine*. I think this speaks well about the 
professionalism of the people behind *ELevate*.



Links:
* The article itself is available for free: 
https://www.linux-magazine.com/Issues/2024/281/AlmaLinux-s-ELevate-Migra
tion-Tool