CentOS 8 End of Life - solution

Introduction

This how-to provides a solution to the problem of CentOS 8 running out of support.
With the end of 2021, CentOS ended its life in its stable form and started functioning as CentOS Stream, a development branch for Red Hat® Enterprise Linux®. As a result, it stopped receiving proven, stable updates and its use, especially in production environments, became risky. This is a very serious problem for many companies and individuals around the world. So there was an urgent need to find a new source of updates for CentOS in order to keep it in the infrastructure. A complete solution to this problem is support switching, that is, pointing to a new repository from which CentOS will be downloading stable updates. Such a solution is offered by EuroLinux. It is worth mentioning that both CentOS and RHEL and EuroLinux are systems built on the same source code, so they provide the same functionality. They differ mainly in branding.

The operation of switching support is simple, reasonably safe and completely reversible. What is very important, it requires neither reinstallation of the system nor the applications installed on it. The process consists of switching the repository, installing the el-release package, updating the system and reinstalling the system packages in-place. After the in-place migration, CentOS will still be usable, even in production environments.

All resources used in this tutorial can be found in the additional resources section.

The solution

A project named eurolinux-migration-scripts has been created. It contains among others a script that will take care of the migration automatically. Here we describe, how to perform the switch successfully.

Preparations

It's vital that the system be updated to the newest release. Use the following command:

sudo yum update -y

Running the migration script

Then download the latest production-ready release of the project containing the script. Unpack the release, visit the unpacked directory and run the script - usually this will require right-clicking in the current directory, using the 'Open in Terminal' option and running this command:

sudo bash migrate2eurolinux.sh

Refer to the project's README for additional commands.

After the switch

Once the migration has finished, it's recommended to reboot your system:

sudo reboot

Once the system has rebooted, the migration process can be considered complete.
In order to quickly verify that it was carried out successfully, we can check the distribution description:

cat /etc/el-release

As a result we should get a response about the distribution and latest EuroLinux version.

Conclusion

As you can see, the process is quick and seamless. You can switch the repository for RHEL, Oracle Linux, AlmaLinux, and Rocky Linux the same way. In each case, the process will look almost identical.

If you have any questions or concerns, please submit them to the repository linked in the additional resources section. Thank you.