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RHEL-8 PSI Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 2020-10-06T08:48:23+00:00 2022-05-10T11:13:00+00:00 false
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Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8

The current state of RHEL 8.6 support is beta.

The central infrastructure (automatic provisioning, upstream package synchronisation and Puppet) are stable and production ready.

The configuration management is done with Puppet like for RHEL 7. RHEL7 and RHEL8 hosts can share the same hierarchy in Hiera and thus also the "same" configuration. In cases where the configuration for RHEL7 or RHEL8 differs, the idea is to have both in parallel in Hiera and Puppet shall select the right one.

Testing

A lot works already out of the box, but no guarantee can be given unless your specfic setup has been tested. The epic RHEL 8.6 Beta Test lists the currently knowns issues. Please add your bugs there too.

Major Known Issues

Major Missing Features

  • not all interesting 3rd-party packages available yet PSILINUX-113

Caveats

Missing or Replaced Packages

List of packages removed in RHEL 8

RHEL 7 RHEL 8 remarks
a2ps recommends to use enscript instead enscript upstream a2ps upstream
blt - blt upstream, does not work with newer Tk version (source)
gnome-icon-theme-legacy - used for RHEL 7 Icewm
... ... here I stopped research, please report/document further packages
devtoolset* gcc-toolset*
git-cvs - cvs itself is not supported by RHEL8, but available through EPEL. Still missing is the support for git cvsimport.

Boot Failure due to Missing RAID Drivers

If the machine does not boot after provisioning with

Warning: /dev/mapper/vg_root-lv_root does not exist
Warning: /dev/vg_root/lv_root does not exist

after a lot of

Warning: dracut-initqueue timeout - starting timeout scripts

the it could be that the RAID controller is not supported any more. There is a full list of such hardware, but e.g. for the LSI MegaRAID SAS there is a dedicated article.

For the LSI MegaRAID SAS there is still a driver available in ElRepo, so it can be installed during provisioning by Puppet. To do so add to Hiera:

base::pkg_group::....:
  - 'kmod-megaraid_sas'

rpm_repos::default:
  - 'elrepo_rhel8'

No Gnome Screen Lock with NX Server

On machines running NX Server Gnome does not provide a screen lock option. Still the screen can be locked running below command in the terminal:

dm-tool lock

The underlying problem is

  • gdm is the standard Display Manager providing the login screen and the screen locking
  • NX server fails to start Gnome with gdm and suggests to use lightdm instead (knowledge base entry)
  • so NX server machines now use lightdm as Display Manager
  • Gnome does not integrate with lightdm screen locking

AFS cache partition not created due to existing XFS signature

It can happen when upgrading an existing RHEL 7 installation that the puppet run produces

Error: Execution of '/usr/sbin/lvcreate -n lv_openafs --size 2G vg_root' returned 5: WARNING: xfs signature detected on /dev/vg_root/lv_openafs at offset 0. Wipe it? [y/n]: [n]

This needs to be fixed manually:

  • run the complaining command and approve (or use --yes)
  • run puppet agent -t to finalize the configuration

Workstation Installation Takes Long and Seams to Hang

On the very first puppet run the command to install the GUI packages takes up to 10 minutes and it looks like it is hanging. Usually it is after the installation of /etc/sssd/sssd.conf. Just give it a bit time.

"yum/dnf search" Gives Permission Denied as Normal User

It works fine beside the below error message:

Failed to store expired repos cache: [Errno 13] Permission denied: '/var/cache/dnf/x86_64/8/expired_repos.json'

which is IMHO OK to not allow a normal user to do changes there.

Documenatation