rhel8.6 has been released, is there an eta for rocky 8.6 ?
Cheers
Iâm guessing pretty soon, if you go by this post:
that does talk about updates, I assume that it will be similar for a full release, or maybe a little longer.
Just wanted to thank everyone at the Rocky Linux team for creating and maintaining and supporting and updating Rockly Linux so well 
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We generally donât give an ETA for minor version releases. I generally strive to have them within a week to the community. Weâve ran into a few snags while building out 8.6. However, as I type this message, we are producing 8.6 images to hand off to the testing team to evaluate and report back issues. In particular, with the likes new modules such as log4j and new streams of php (8.0) and perl (5.32).
If I had to guess, we may have a release sometime this weekend or starting next week as we also continue to work on Rocky 9.
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It is done when it is done. Iâve never felt (with CentOS) that I didnât get what I paid for even if I have to wait a bit. Rocky has the same price as CentOS âŚ
ELRepo has already some âel8_6â packages. That is good. It would be embarrassing to update kernel and boot without critical devices. (Been there, done that. 
)
ELRepo has already some âel8_6â packages.
This also means you should not try to update ELRepo packages till the time you update to Rocky 8.6.
OK is this going to be like CentOS and be a simple Rollover? If so Iâd better start thinking of Backingup my WS NOW!! (This should be "Interesting" as Rocky sits on an NVMe Gen 4 drive).
To be fair, thatâs the same as RHEL, RHEL will automatically go from 8.5 to 8.6 on a âdnf updateâ in most cases, the only time it wonât is if you have run:
subscription-manager release --set=8.5
Also, there wonât be a 8.5 EUS so far as Iâm aware, since 8.4 was the previous EUS, so 8.6 is the current/next EUS, so even with RHEL, itâll be recommended to go from 8.5/8.4 to 8.6.
So basically, any RHEL clone will automatically rollover into the next release, itâs completely normal.
With that said, so far all upgrades from 8.4/8.5 to 8.6 have been successful without any problems for me[1].
[1] I use both official RHEL and RockyLinux.
PS: You should have backups in any case, just because itâs an enterprise level distro and on an NVMe, doesnât make it immune from disasters and I have seen NVMeâs fail 
Always keep a working, checked and tested backup at all timesâŚ
Amen Brother! You are preaching to the choir â I usually make two full disk backups: one right after a new release comes out and has more or less stabilized; and one right before before a NEW release comes out, just in case the NEW release goes South. That has pulled my butt out of the fire twice, when I ran a rollover that took issue with something that it did not like. I wiped the entire drive out and then restored it from by backup. In this case I have RL 8.5 on a 4th Gen NVMe drive, which has given me a bunch of hissy fits, but I think I have solved the problem. I have already made a backup just in case the problem reoccurs again, but so far NOT (fingers crossed â I have ZERO idea which solved the problem). Guess Iâll find out for sure when I do the rolloverâŚ
Naturally. Although, that is more about user data and config â the system files should be trivial to reinstall.
By definition of Enterprise Linux, the point updates do not introduce drastic changes and hence dnf up should be quite safe. The âmigrate from CentOS Linux 8 to another cloneâ script was more âexcitingâ, but since I have means to trivially (re)install from scratch it was not so scary.
@desercat Fair enough, I misunderstood your meaning about your backups, glad to hear you keep routine backups
@jlehtone To be fair, it read to me as though s/he had no backups at all with the only backup being that one prior to upgrade. I agree entirely with your backup method, but my point was that s/he should always have backups (not just for upgrades) as I thought he wasnât keeping daily/hourly/etc user data backups, naturally weâve since seen s/he does.
I agree entirely that most upgrades will go without problems. Although, even on systems which do introduce drastic changes for example Tumbleweed (rolling release) which I use for my workstation can mostly also upgrade without problems so long as you keep an eye on recent changes and/or read release notes and make adjustments as necessary.
But Iâve got big plans for new RHEL 9 / Rocky 9 setups, but with 8.6 remaining on the current âunderlyingâ libvirt host servers - so Iâm just reading everything about the recent changes to prep for upcoming changes and plans. Hyped over here 
PS: Yes, I totally see the irony of only using RHEL+Clones for our servers and SUSE for my own desktop/workstation - in my defence I used Fedora for 15+ years previously on my workstation, but fancied a change and it stuck 
In addition to my FULL DISK backups I use BackupNinja for weekly backups of key partitions.
As to RHEL (or is that OUR HELL?) 9 / Rocky 9⌠I have no intention of loading 9.0, or 9.1 XYZ.0 is filled with so many BUGS if industrial strength RAID does not exterminate them all, and XYZ .1 is only slightly better. With LUCK by the time 9.2 or 9.3 rolls around 8.x will have stabilized enough to actually be useful.
Like you my buddy and I are considering switching to openSUSE 15.3 Leap for our day-to-day WS. Me?? I feel more comfortable with Red Hat as I understand the way it works â I better after 20+ years. openSUSE is simply WEIRD. That said I have it up and running. Right now either SUSE or RL will become our primary OS, and the other will be our secondary OS.
As to Fedora⌠Iâve feel Iâve been to the the Blood Bank, but thatâs the price for living on the Bleeding Edge.
Dâ Cat
This is all going off topic now⌠but youâve got me talking about servers⌠I canât hold back
Depends on your use case to be fair, I say the same about which distro to use (with the exception being new distros that were invented âlast nightâ with âsome new unknown guyâ that simply change the theme - they will never hit my systems)
For example, on the bare metal - I will be absolutely leaving 8.6 in place. 9 will only come into play on bare metal after 9.2+ and only as new servers come into play. Although, hardware RAID generally doesnât fix software bugs, unless those bugs happen to be in md itself - so software raid or hardware raid - buggy software will mostly still be there.
In my experience, Iâll go with hardware raid on data-critical systems where that battery comes in handy (something software raid can never supply). Hardware raid doesnât always mean a faster array rebuild these days either, heck sometimes it could be slower, unlike the old days!
(Iâm talking about hardware raid with battery, not the default BIOS raid⌠which is often simply a glorified software raid).
In any case, I always say use the distro thatâs most suitable for the job, not the distro with the prettiest name.
For example, one system of ours runs debian - why? Because of the software it runs - despite being provided as a docker container - is only âofficiallyâ supported on debian. Could you get EL to run it? Almost certainly. But then youâll get the loathsome âdisable SELinuxâ advice or âsorry, we donât support that platformâ response.
So, if you stick it on the âdistro we recommendâ - theyâre happy when it comes to bug reports etc and canât blame SELinux and/or EL for the problem. Though, youâll find the same thing with software thatâll say only supported for RHEL âand not clonesâ.
On the other hand, another system runs RHEL 8.6 and acts more like a fileserver for our other servers to backup to using SSH and GPG encrypted archives. Those servers have a login with a passwordless keyfile - each to their own user account, with their own key on the file server. That user account is restricted to being unable to run binary files, unable to use su or sudo, and confined to the SELinux âguestâ user (system policy also being set to MLS). The SSH also only being open to systems within our internal VPN (rocky server ). I wouldnât trust this system at all if it was debian based without SELinux in placeâŚ
I really, really, hate when someone proposes disabling SELinux as a âsolutionâ. SELinux is relatively easy once you understand it, and if you install SETroubleshoot, itâll even tell you how to fix it in most cases, could be as simple as toggle a bool. Itâs been around long enough now⌠it makes me laugh when someone says âDisable SELinux, itâs a PITA!â followed by âLinux is insecure!â
RHEL 9 / Rocky 9 will come into play for web servers that run on top of RHEL 8 hosts - I already know what to expect with this since our development/testing servers run CentOS Stream 9 already on those hosts (as libvirt guests).
For a web server, more recent versions of PHP / MariaDB etc are more desirable. Sure, RHEL 8 has software collections & remi repo. But thereâs other new things in RHEL 9 also (Like support for ed25519_sk SSH keys, I really wish RH would backport this already).
So generally, I always use and recommend the distro best suited for the job at hand.
With that said, even on RHEL 8.5, one of my servers was throwing a kernel error every night due to the hardware being a little bit too new for the old kernel - thankfully the kernel in 8.6 has stopped those nightly errors.
I havenât tried/used SUSE Leap personally, but it seems stable? Although I did read recently there is a push to change it into MicroOS (their version of Silverblue, immutable filesystemsâŚ) with the current Leap format coming to an end in favour of it.
For my own system, I use Tumbleweed (not immutable, software comes from distro itself) simply because out of all the rolling distros, I found it to be the most stable. It provides me with the latest software and uses btrfs with snapshots enabled by default - so you can simply rollback to pre-update should something break. Thatâs super handy for a system that needs to be used for development, administration (servers), accounting, gaming (sorry!) and pretty much anything else I need/want to do.
Of course, I wouldnât put it on a server however
Anyhow⌠this post became longer than I intended⌠sorry!
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