We're in the middle of moving to the cloud. CentOS 7 is dead for us.

Some are new. As I understand it, most of CentOS devs are RH employees. Some of SL devs might join too.

Good to know. Although I need that 5y cycle. I might play with it anyway or use it for our bleeding edge systems.

Hello All

Springdale Linux (formerly PUIAS Linux) is an RHEL clone that currently offers EL8.3 boot disk and repositories. It is a small project providing binaries built from the RedHat sources for use in a number of US based universities, some workstation and I gather mostly clusters.

The Web site has links to the 8.3 boot disks, and repositories are on that same /data tree. There is a mailing list run via Google groups, searching on springdale-users will find it. The project is mentioned in the link below...

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020...-alternatives/

Disclaimer: I am a clueless end user and run Slackware. I used Centos/SciLi/PUIAS for a bit in the version 5/6 days. Best of luck.

Just a couple of links posted on forums.centos.org that seem relevant here:

• an announcement by CloudLinux promising a new RHEL8 clone by Q1 2021
• a script converting a CentOS instance to Oracle Linux

Not a fan of Oracle, but the FAQ linked from that script is a good response.

Cloud Linux is not free and targeted at VPS hosting.

Oracle is Oracle.

You haven't read their announcement, have you?

No. I went to their website and looked for source code.

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Your argument doesn't make much sense, really. So what you're saying is that you're not going to use an open-source community driven project, because it's created by a company whose main product is commercial? Doesn't seem too clever to me. Not that I'd recommend cloudlinux necessarily, but at least make your decision based on sensible arguments.

On another train of thoughts: Ubuntu can be used in production without any issues. The only "problem" would be that it offers only 5-year support - which is normally more than reasonable.

Given that Centos 7 is EOL in 2024, there's still enough time to weigh up your options, as a lot of projects that already rely heavily on CentOS are obviously going to need to find alternatives (for instance cpanel say they're going to support Ubuntu LTS in late 2021 and that they're going to support the cloudlinux-supported project Lenix also).

Please read my only blog-entry to that topic.

I am very sad to hear that CentOs is going away. It is so stable, such an intelligent choice!

Except now you have to deal with Oracle.

I have to wonder about those using CentOS on "production" servers. At places where I've worked using RHEL in production, CentOS was often used for the development and test environments. Worked just like production but you didn't pay for support in your non-prod environments. Those folks are screwed now. If you switch to Stream, your dev/test environment is ahead of production in some ways so you would might need to wait for RHEL to catch up to Stream before deploying new software. That's going to be an interesting variable to include in one's project plans.

In attempting to find a solution to "What other than CentOS" I found Oracle Linux. I had an issue where the installer was unable to find any disks on my Dell PowerEdge, and I learned that the Oracle guys decided to remove kernel modules to read my drives. I'm sure it's a good distro, but they need to get those kernel modules or I'm sticking with other solutions.

Another solution? OpenSUSE might be a good option, it's mostly neutral (does not really tick off the sysadmin community) and it's pretty good as far as stability goes. They even have an enterprise solution with support, but I've never used it so cannot with a good conscious vouch for it, but it is worth a try.

When you want to keep the RedHat-Style and are used to it, the only reliable/stable option is buying a RHEL-subscription after the support for CentOS 7 ends. Rockylinux is just in the planning, Scientific may be revived but is not there now, Oracle has too many other "closed-shop"-issues, Fedora is somehow the same like "CentOS-Stream" and not fit for enterprise-use.

We are using Dell-Servers too and pure Debian runs very well on them and for VMs you can use Debian too, or Alpine or Arch. Also actual iDrac-Cards, since Gen8, can do everything that you needed "OMSA" for before and additionally that OMSA-stuff could run too on Debian.

Most likely you don't have to make a decision right now anyways, C7 is maintained until June 30, 2024.

I'm still on Cent OS 6.10 on lot of my servers/VMs as I just never got around to upgrading everything, but I'm definitely in a situation where I need to upgrade now as all the repositories are dead so even if I want to install something I can't without jumping through lot of hoops, let alone, not getting updates. Already did a few boxes so far and went Debian 10.

It does a lot of things differently and there's lot of weird quicks I find... lot of stuff that is just not right out of the box. Like the user not being in sudoers file and having to google how to do that. just little things like that, which are really annoying to have to deal with when you have a bunch of boxes to do.

I will experiment with preseed files so I can try to automate a lot of that stuff though. Though Rocky Linux might still be a viable route, I may still look at that.

From what I understand Debian has a decent support life as well.

You'd probably be better off using ansible. It has a light learning curve and it would easily be able to carry out these small tasks.

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