Almalinux 8 beta has just been released. And I’ve already set it all up in katello 3.17, and registered a client and set up repos and packages and such. So far, it all seems to be “working”. (no Errata yet, but that’s on their to-do soon).
In Katello, the operating system version shows up as “Unknown 8.3”. (Which I totally get, given how new it is)
As such, I’m just throwing it out there to request AlmaLinux support in a future version of Katello.
AlmaLinux is a new 1:1 replacement for the now-dead “CentOS 8” project.
In addition it has to be recognized by the configuration management solutions underneath, so if you can test facter (for puppet), ansible-facts, grains (salt) and /or however it is called in chef it would be helpful. If these tools do not report what is expected, an issue for them has also to be filed.
CloudLinux appears to be a RHEL clone for some time now and although most RHEL clones work just fine, Foreman/Katello have never recognized it properly. Why such a rush? AlmaLinux is not even in a final release. I would not be surprised after the heated announcement and many new RHEL clones announced, things will settle down and most people will get back to CentOS Stream, Oracle EL and RHEL. Having said that, we will be able to help and get your patches in if you really need a proper icon, name recognition or any other features or bugs you will find along the way.
To get you started, this is where you add a new icon:
I don’t understand the “this isn’t how open source works” comment.
Regardless, thank you for the reply. I also vehemently disagree on your thought that everyone’s just gonna go back to Stream.
Both Rocky Linux and AlmaLinux are going to be quite popular replacements for CentOS over time. (Probably Rocky Linux moreso given things I’ve been a part of recently).
I do hope these replacements for CentOS get supported over time. Thank you.
I think what @lzap means that work is not done by just requesting support somewhere. This can work if some is interested in picking up the work because he also needs it or get paid to do it. At least creating an issue like suggested will get the request to be tracked and noticed but does not ensure that someone is picking it up for the same reason. If you can provide a pull request instead it is very likely that someone will take some of his time to review and if reasonable merge it, this is why he posted some hints to start.
In this specific case many people will want to wait for the dust to settle before using their time on such an issue, but if you want or need it done fast, you are free to come up with patches were the support is needed.
Yes, while I did make a comment here originally about the issue, I did actually follow up at that time and properly submitted a feature request in the foreman bug tracker / issue support area.
I understand it of course could be a very long time before Alma is recognized as viable and support added. I’m just trying to be… efficient.
thanks all!
(Sadly, Im a sysadmin and not a programmer, so I don’t have the skillset to git/pull/merge/change etc, but I appreciate the info anyway!)
Point made and taken. I guess the real sentiment of this topic is that there are changes happening out there in distro land and @caseybea was wondering how that impacts Foreman development. As sysadmins and users of Foreman/Katello we are being asked by “The powers that be” where we go regarding platforms following the CentOS announcement. It’s an interesting question to be sure and Foreman and all it’s underlying components and plugins will need to address this(I don’t doubt that there is a lot of discussion in the Foreman virtual back offices).
If there is anything I can do with over 30 years of UNIX/Linux sysadmin experience(with a smattering of python dev) please point me in the right direction.
I certainly appreciate the vastness of the Foreman prject and love the work you guys are doing.
You are free to just create a tracking RFE ticket in our Redmine, that’s for starters. I know this community very well and I don’t expect anyone from the regular contributors to pick it up, we see mostly CentOS, RHEL, OEL and Debian systems but that does not mean you should not do that. Upvoted issues also draw our attention, no cheating tho
I see you’ve done that. Good. And if you want to try a patch, the change is really trivial, you can just copy/paste the lines and test it on your environment if it worked. I tried my best to find you the exact places you need to find. There are also licensing issues that needs to be sorted out before we merge a piece of art (e.g. icon) into our repo - this can take some time researching or getting a permission.
“I wish best of luck to those who are afraid to predict the future.”
— lzap, 2021
Seriously, all I am saying is to consider waiting, things might not be that bad as it looks like. IT infrastructure is about stability, reliability, wise and calm decisions. No rush is my motto, I’ve learned this the hard way. And again, we are ready to merge work to support fresh clones, we have no problems with that. There’s no need to cite irrelevant quotes here.
We slightly discussed this on this forum, but my take on this is this puts Foreman and Katello specifically even in the stronger position. Users of CentOS Stream should consider to do proper content management now. And users of other distributions should do the same. Everyone who is doing yum -y update or apt-get -y upgrade on production installs without proper testing is playing dangerous game. Bugs happen.
One clear impact can be already seen in the recent release of Foreman, we made sure that CentOS 8 Stream works fine. Until now, we kinda assumed it works. And it wasn’t.
Excellent. In retrospect, I’m jumping the gun a little bit. And based on things I have seen lately, it’s actually going to be Rocky Linux that will be the CentOS8 replacement standard, and not necessarily Almalinux.
I have no doubt that by the time I make the decision to actually pull the trigger (on which CentOS8 new distro I go with), that the folks that support Foreman/Katello will have made the appropriate tweaks to recognise those distro(s).
There wiill certainly be some folks that just go with stream, but too many of us prefer the slightly delayed approach to Centos8/Alma/Rocky as opposed to the bleeding edge setup of stream. The two are going to end up being quite different over time.
Meanwhile, I will insert my hands under my thighs and just sit quietly for a while and see how it all shakes out.
thank you all for listening, and I want to thank EVERYONE for the work on Foreman/Katello. I switched from the older Spacewalk a few years ago and haven’t looked back. It just… works. And works well.
Note, my original request/etc on all this is ONLY as pertains to supporting the new distro(s) in terms of those hosts being properly recognized as registered/recognized clients (“node: Fred. OS: Rocky 8”). I am in no way asking for support on which platform Foreman server RUNS on. That is a whole VERY much larger issue.
