Hi all,

As we're slowly approaching end of the year, and that 2024 is around the corner, I thought it would be good to discuss remaining centos linux 7 usage in our own infra, and so what to expect (or not). As a reminder, CentOS Linux 7 will go EOL in June 2024 so before that, we should have either decommissioned, or migrated from workload still running on CentOs 7

Here is the list of remaining services and action[s]:

# mirrorlist/mirror network It's not a secret that starting from CentOS Stream 9, the default vhost for the mirror network is mirror.stream.centos.org, and the way dnf is configured by default is to use metalink prepared by Mirrormanager (hosted and maintained by Fedora infra team).

So that means that : - all nodes behind mirror.centos.org can go away (and content pushed to vault.centos.org, as usual) and eventually (to be discussed) the A/AAAA record for mirror.centos.org completely removed from public DNS - mirrorlist.centos.org will also be decommissioned and so not answering anything anymore (A/AAAA record removed from public DNS too)

The potential impact when we'll just decommission mirrorlist.centos.org is for SIGs building for RHEL (and not Stream) 8 and so still relying on mirrorlist= in their shipped .repo. The list of impacted SIGs should be really small and as the content itself will probably moved to mirror.stream.centos.org, there will be a different thread to discuss how to do that

# CentOS Forums (https://forums.centos.org) We discussed this already in the past (on this list and elsewhere) : while we can quickly migrate that service to newer stack, the underlying question was more about current moderators saying that nobody will maintain that service after June 2024. So in the current situation, we'll just decommission the forums in 2024 with no replacement. Should the situation change between now and June 2024, we'd be able to migrate (or not) the service.

# mailing list (lists.centos.org) This is probably the only public service still running on CentOS Linux 7 and for which I intend to work with Fedora Infra about the mailman3 stack. Their plan is to have it in Epel 9 so that they can themselves upgrade and we can then modify our ansible role for mailman and also test a list migration from mailman2 to mailman3.

# torrent trackers We used to have torrent files for CentOS releases, but it stopped with CentOS Linux 8 and no .torrent files are produced for Stream artifacts. As the infra is still running centos linux 7, and that it will not be needed anymore after CentOS 7 EOL, we'll just decommission the service entirely.

# centos linux 7 buiders (infra) Not publicly visible but pretty obvious that we'll just keep that infra running until CentOS Linux 7 EOL and then we'll just decommission it entirely (as we'll not have to care about building/shipping anything for centos linux 7