On Thu, 18 Mar 2021 at 09:36, Lamar Owen <lowen at pari.edu> wrote: > On 3/18/21 1:24 AM, John R. Dennison wrote: > > It's not realistic to expect server-class machines not to be able to > > boot from dual-layer or USB media in 2021. > There are environments where USB or other writeable media are not > allowed on premises. > > While all DVD-ROM drives are supposed to read DL media, in practice the > compatibility has not proven to be 100%. > _______________________________________________ > I think we are rabbit-holing on a bunch of related issues: 1. "How old hardware should be expected to work." Again this is not the core issue the original person was asking. Upstream (RHEL) usually expects hardware that is confirmed to work to be usable through the release time. This hardware is usually on the year of release to 4 years afterwards. So RHEL-7 was released in 2014, so tested hardware configurations from 2014-2018 should work. Outside of that there are some work to make it work but the rules from online docs seem to be that if the hardware was from before 2012 and not a tested configuration, it should stick to RHEL-6. [This is mostly about a level of support that would be given point of view.. sure you could get it to work on a 2004 computer.. but if it breaks support is not going to spend hours/days/weeks trying to make it work. Consulting services are for that..] CentOS has no support levels so if it works cool. if it doesn't then sorry. That goes for any dot release. If something is not caught in testing when various dot releases are being built.. that's too bad. [This isn't a new thing.. we didn't respin 5 releases when something wasn't caught until months later.] Also this is not really related to the original person's problem. It worked for them for many different releases and doesn't now. 2. "What are expected release results?" This is what the original question falls into. They have been running under the assumption that one set of DVD's would fall under a limit size for the single density drives. It has worked for multiple releases before 7.9 and then it didn't. However that expectation does not seem to have been in the testing procedures as a 'halt' level problem (i.e. measured in testing and then sent back if failed.) I will be honest on my part, I have only done a 'looks' good enough as I don't have single density DVD's to test if it worked or not. I use USB sticks and virtual machines. I am expecting the other testers to have done the same thing. 3. "What can be done". This is what the original question needs answered. This was not caught in the release of 7.9 and that was a while ago. There are not going to be any more dot releases for 7.. there is no planned 7.10 so this is the final set of DVD's until 2024. At this moment, I don't know if a respin will make the images small enough and what would have to be dropped to make it fit. Respinning 'official images' now will also cause problems for a lot of mirrors and users who will ask 'did these images get hacked? why did it change now?' [And in either case, the original person needed this fixed yesterday, not in the 2+ weeks to do this.] I am guessing someone could make an unofficial set of spins which cut out some packages to try and make it fit in single density. -- Stephen J Smoogen.