Hi all
We currently have a foreman master with 3 smart proxies all running Foreman 3.2 with Katello 4.4 (latest at time of install)
These are all setup on CentOS 7 machines. We have OEL7/8 available to use if needs be, but would like to confirm what OS’s are supported for the 3.5 (3.6 isnt fully supported yet). I am reading only enterprise linux 8 is allowed - please can someone confirm?
I am looking to fix a common-text vulnerability we have identified and upgrading would make sense.
thanks
Yes, any RHEL-compatible rebuild of RHEL8 and CentOS Stream 8 are supported.
We use OEL. Presume not supported? And sounds like we can’t do a stepped upgrade from 3.2/4.4 and stay on CentOS7?
Also decided to wait until 3.6 is fully ready as 3.5 doesn’t appear to contain an apache common-text vuln we require yet.
You gotta ask Oracle if OEL is RHEL compatible or not.
OEL is a RHEL compatible RHEL rebuild (not a very good one in my opinion, but that’s another topic), so you Foreman and Katello should run on OEL. We also have had some users report they are successfully running the Foreman/Katello stack on OEL, so it should indeed work.
For your question about staying on CentOS 7, no that’s not an option. Foreman 3.3 was (to my knowledge) the last release that supported running on any EL7, from Foreman 3.4 onwards only EL8 is supported (RHEL8, CentOS8, etc).
good to know, thank you. Looks like we are re-building foreman instead of upgrading 
No need to rebuild, you can also in-place upgrade or restore an EL7 backup on EL8?
It’s CentOS7 - > EL8. That would be great if we can
In-place upgrading can be a bit tricky with Oracle Linux, but should in theory work from CentOS7 to Oracle Linux 8.
You can take a look at Upgrading and Updating Foreman for a general guide on how to do an in-place upgrade and Possible to use Leapp for Oracle 7 -> Oracle 8 migration? for some additional hints on possible Oracle Linux pitfalls. It is a lengthy thread, but most of the content way derailed to handling a missing steps from the upgrade documentation that has since been added.
If you try to go that route, I highly recommend taking a snapshot or full machine backup beforehand, so you have a way back in case something goes wrong.
It might be easier to use one of the conversion scripts to go CentOS7 → OEL7, then OEL7 → OEL8. You’ll likely need to edit the oracle_upgrade.py file as discussed in the thread that @areyus linked to.
As far as Foreman/Katello being compatible on OEL, I’ve never had any problems with it. The only real catch is on the client machines. Oracle replaces subscription-manager with rhn. So in my content views, I filter out the rhn -related packages from the Oracle repositories, then also sync the Centos repository and only include the subscription-manager packages. Obviously I’ll need to find a different EL-compatible Linux for that for OEL9.
Let me know if you have any other questions about running on OEL!