Chapter 6. November 2023
6.1. Red Hat Hybrid Cloud Console
6.1.1. Published blogs and resources
Red Hat Insights offers timely blogs and other resources to supplement our official documentation.
6.2. Red Hat Insights for Red Hat Enterprise Linux
6.2.1. Insights Client/RHC
End of Life for Basic Authentication for Insights client
Effective February 29th, 2024, the insights-client will no longer support Basic Authentication (authmethod=basic) as an option for connecting a host with Red Hat Insights. For more information, and guidance about how to switch to alternative options, see the Red Hat Insights lifecycle and update page.
6.2.2. Conversions
CentOS 7 pre-conversion analysis and conversion experience launched
On June 30, 2024, CentOS Linux 7 will reach End of Life (EOL), requiring users to migrate to a new operating system to continue receiving updates, security patches and new features. As this date rapidly approaches, determining a path for migration and scope will be key as you work to assign resources and meet completion dates. With a recent update to Red Hat Insights, CentOS 7 users can now:
- Register CentOS Linux 7 systems to display in the Insights inventory list.
- Start a new pre-conversion task at Automation Toolkit > Tasks > Pre-conversion analysis for converting to RHEL to analyze selected CentOS Linux 7 systems, and receive remediation advice so you can proactively handle issues that could complicate or prevent conversion to RHEL.
- Run a new conversion task at Automation Toolkit > Tasks > Convert to RHEL from CentOS Linux 7 after you resolve issues identified by the pre-conversion analysis to complete the conversion to RHEL.
Example of output from running a conversion task in Insights
You can find all Insights tasks at Automation Toolkit > Tasks.
You can learn more about these new features and get started with:
6.2.3. Advisor
New recommendations released
Fourteen new recommendations are available:
- Separate the journal directories for better performance and recoverability of InterSystems IRIS
- Enable FreezeOnError for the integrity and recoverability of InterSystems IRIS database
- The system is unable to boot when missing systemd related components
- The insights-client BASIC authmethod will reach End-Of-Life on Feb 28th, 2024
- The /var/log/messages or /var/log/secure are not writable due to incorrect syslog configuration, file permissions or SELinux context
- The InterSystems product version is older than ideal for top-quality support
- Recommend running SystemPerformance 24-hour daily for InterSystems IRIS
- Kernel panic occurs when cifs filesystems are mounted on the RHEL 8 system due to a bug in the kernel
- Set arbiter to prevent a possible split-brain situation for InterSystems IRIS
- Map the Write Image Journaling (WIJ) disk for better performance of InterSystems IRIS
- Use G1 garbage collector to get better performance for JBoss server
- The system will boot into emergency mode when the os-release file is lost
- Applications failed to create sessions when the maximum session limit is reached
- It takes an unexpected long time for the system to boot due to a known bug in systemd
New InterSystems topic
Red Hat Insights currently has ten Advisor recommendations available for the InterSystems workload. You can find the InterSystems recommendations in a new Advisor topic at Advisor > topics > Intersystems on the Red Hat Hybrid Console. Insights will continue to add InterSystems-focused recommendations to this new topic. To see all Advisor topics, go to Advisor > topics.
6.2.4. Patch
Improved patch reporting for Satellite-managed hosts
You can now check in Satellite-managed hosts with a new –build-packagecache flag for better reporting of installable updates. With the flag set, the host will self-report the list of updates that should be installed based on the content available in the Satellite content view to which that system is subscribed. You can find more information in:
- Knowledge-Centered Service (KCS) article: Red Hat Insights shows incorrect patch reporting for Satellite-managed systems.
6.2.5. Image Builder
Known issue: Insights image builder fails to build RHEL for Edge images when npm is included
When building RHEL 8 images within Insights image builder, you cannot customize your RHEL for Edge image with the npm package. The NPM package manager expects its configuration to be in the {prefix}/etc/npmrc directory but the npm RPM packages a symlink in the /usr/etc/npmrc directory that links to /etc/npmrc. To work around this problem, include the npm package inside of the OSTree system.
Insights image builder now supports building images for the aarch64 architecture
This enhancement to image builder extends support to the aarch64 architecture, which allows you to select the architecture that you want to build. The compatible target images that you can build for the aarch64 architecture are Amazon Web Service (AWS), Bare Metal, and Guest Images.
Support to build images suitable for Windows Subsystem Linux (WSL)
You can use the Red Hat Insights image builder to create an image suitable for Windows Subsystem Linux (WSL). You can use that image to run a Linux environment directly on your Windows machine. You can use most of the command-line tools, utilities, and applications. The kernel is supplied by Microsoft, and developed on WSL2-Linux-Kernel. This is supported only for the Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 8 release. For more information, see Create customized RHEL images for the WSL environment.
