Due to changes in the way MariaDB has setup their Centos yum repositories, cPanel (at the time of writing) is unable to access the necessary files to upgrade people from MySQL to MariaDB (as it needs to do it in stages and MariaDB 10.0 is no longer available).
Whilst the cPanel knowledgebase article entitled “Can’t upgrade from MySQL 5.6 to MariaDB” and cPanel have acknowledged it as an internal bug with the reference CPANEL-40434, they say there is “no workaround at this time”. This is incorrect!
As I posted on their forums in the “One of the configured repositories failed (MariaDB106)” thread (unfortunately my post – 14 hours on – is still pending moderation), there is a reasonably quick fix server administrators can do. Here’s the full text of the post “just in case”:
Since I’ve hit this problem on a new server migrating from MySQL to MariaDB (and my much earlier post about how to fix the general issue seems to have just expired rather than be approved), here’s what I did to fix it.
Platform: Centos v7.9 on x64 – migrating from MySQL 5.7 to MariaDB 10.6
If you do not have /etc/yum.repos.d/MariaDB102.repo , start an upgrade to MariaDB and let it die.
1. Copy /etc/yum.repos.d/MariaDB102.repo to /etc/yum.repos.d/MariaDB102-patch.repo
2. Modify /etc/yum.repos.d/MariaDB102-patch.repo to change the baseurl to https://archive.mariadb.org/mariadb-10.2/yum/centos7-amd64
3. Copy that file now as /etc/yum.repos.d/MariaDB103-patch.repo
4. Modify MariaDB103-patch.repo so “102” is changed to “103” throughout and the base URL has 10.3
5. Repeat steps 3 and 4 to go from “103/10.3” to “104/10.4” etc all the way up to 106/10.6
6. Do yum clean all;yum makecache
7. Go to the Database upgrade page (select “Ignore current upgrade” if necessary)
8. And upgrade!
Bit long winded and fiddly, but it worked for me(tm)