Updates on the CentOS 7 EOL: 2024-06-30

I am writing this on 2024-06-20 which means according to the IRC centbot:

  centbot: CentOS 7 will go EOL on 30 June, 2024 -- in 1 week,

 10 hours, 22 minutes, and 41 seconds.
  

The CentOS Systems Administrator, Fabian Arrotin, has posted several updates about what to expect starting Monday Jul 1st, 2024. The first email covers what services will stop after the 'End of Life' occurs:

1. mirrorlist.centos.org will be decommissioned. This will affect any system trying to do a `yum update` or similar command after that date.
2. forums.centos.org
will be turned off and decommissioned. This was a volunteer effort by various system administrators who are ending their work with CentOS at the end of 7.
3. torrent.centos.org
will be turned off and decommissioned. This was useful for putting out new isos, but was no longer done for the CentOS Stream project.

Removal of mirrorlist will probaby cause various cron jobs and similar tools to stop working. Manual work will be needed to either turn off the CentOS repos affected in /etc/yum.repos.d/ files or something similar. The loss of forums will mainly affect people looking for answers for problems with EL7 and before systems. Similar answers may be available at stackoverflow or similar sites.

Fabian's second email covers what systems mirroring CentOS Linux 7 can expect and when.

1. First it reiterates that all EL7 content from mirror.centos.org will be removed. Also that the mirrorlists will be turned off and no longer answering.
2. Second crawlers will be turned off to see what mirrors are 'up-to-date' with EL7 content as the release is over.
3. Third, the head rsync mirrors will continue to exist, but will only have an 'empty' filelist on it. This will cause all mirrors which do an rsync with --delete flags to remove all EL7 content from their mirror. This is normal for end of life releases as disk space needs to be used for other content.

The biggest issues that system administrators with EL7 systems need to be ready to do are the following:

1. Be prepared that existing scripts and tools pulling in EL7 content will break without work.
2. If you are mirroring EL7 content, and need to keep it, you need to check that the rsync scripts do not delete content which is no longer on the mirror. If you are using reposync or similar commands you will need to look for similar options.
3. You should look at mirroring the content local to your site until your organization has a transition plan to another operating system.
4. You should work with your management and financial resources on a transition plan if you haven't already.