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Rocky Times Ahead

HADES

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CentOS 8 is a great operating system. Unfortunately RedHat (now owned by IBM) has decided to stop supporting CentOS 8, and will no longer release updates for the operating system after 2021. In other words, by the end of December, CentOS 8 is basically dead.

Our game servers currently run on CentOS 8. We switched from CentOS 7 to 8 in early 2020 (before RedHat made the dreaded announcement). I also spent two weeks during the Covid lock-down writing the software that currently manages our game servers. This software (written for CentOS 8) has made it possible for Tom and I to re-deploy (setup & configure) a fully functional game server from scratch in just few minutes - something that used to take us days.

CentOS 8 performance and stability have been solid. Going back to CentOS 7, or switching to a different Linux distro is an option, but will require a lot of time and effort and a partial re-write of the server management software.

A fork of CentOS 8 called Rocky Linux should be available by December 2021. Rocky Linux will attempt to be a "bug-for-bug" compatible with CentOS 8 - meaning it is a copy (or almost a copy) of CentOS 8.

The Rocky Linux project and community appear to be doing well, and are on pace for a release candidate of Rocky Linux in Q2 according to their community update: https://forums.rockylinux.org/t/community-update-february-2021/193

If the project is a success, I plan to switch to Rocky Linux. However, I do not expect this transition/migration to go without issues. I'm also evaluating alternative solutions in case the Rocky Linux project fails. In either case, expect some rocky times ahead - nothing that will bring us down permanently, but we could be down for few days up to few weeks depending on how things play out.
 

Tom Da Bomb

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whatever it takes for you to make things work will work for us lol, all it takes for me is time to learn whatevers new and manage stuff so im always good, and if stuff is down for a little thats a bummer but we will survive if they come back up eventually, and we definitely want your software to run with it as well :oops: otherwise we wouldnt be able to manage and keep things going with all the BS that always seems to hit us

which ends up requiring a reinstall of everything, or updates to the servers plugins etc. which wouldnt be do-able for us currently without the options it has, so we will definitely make it work if you can ;)
 

HADES

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The Rocky Enterprise Software Foundation (RESF) is pleased to announce the general availability of the Rocky Linux 8.3 Release Candidate 1 for x86_64 and aarch64 architectures.


A release candidate (RC) is a good step forward.
 

HADES

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Rocky Linux is available as a general stable release!

 
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