Dear CTA community,
We are happy to announce that we have created 2 new public directories for our Alma 9 CTA releases:
https://cta-public-repo.web.cern.ch/stable/
- Stable CTA releases for Alma 9.
- These are the recommended versions for other sites to install.
- Not all CTA versions will be put here. Only the versions that we are confident that work without any major issues, or that are critical for upgrading a CTA deployment.
https://cta-public-repo.web.cern.ch/testing/
- Testing CTA releases for Alma 9.
- All “CERN internal” CTA releases for Alma 9 will be put here, even if they are not guaranteed to be stable.
- Can be used by external sited to test and experiment with new CTA features.
For the moment, only the testing repository contains the Alma9 CTA RPMs. We will update the stable repository after we conclude successfully our transition to Alma 9 at CERN.
Hi Joao,
Many thanks for this. We have created mirrors of all the CTA 5 repos for EL9 in our mirror server.
It is possible to give us a rough time scale of when you are plannning to conclude the transition to Alma 9 at CERN?
George
Hi George,
The hard deadline to migrate to Alma 9 is the CERN CentOS 7 end-of-life (30 June 2024). Our migration plan is tied to the delivery of new servers. All being well we will migrate during May.
Michael
Hi Michael,
Thanks for your reply. OK, so you will then populate Index of /stable/cta-5/el9/cta/x86_64 at some point in June. This makes sense given your standard practise to tag as a public release the CTA version that you have by running in production at CERN for about a month. I am afraid, it would be too late for us to start our migration work in June
Would it be please possible to put the 5.10.8-1 rpms in the Index of /testing/cta-5/el9/cta/x86_64?
This is the latest stable version for EL7 and the one we will upgrade to ar RAL in a couple of weeks. It would allow us to start testing the EL9 migration sooner rather than later.
George
Hi George,
There is no upgrade path for 5.10.8 to Alma 9. There were several issues in the code and dependencies that had to be fixed. So we recommend you upgrade to 5.10.10 before doing the OS upgrade.
We will put the 5.10.10 version into the public repo shortly.
Michael
Hello George,
We have made the 5.10.9.1-1 and 5.10.10.1-1 versions of CTA public here (for CentOS-7):
https://cta-public-repo.web.cern.ch/cta-5/el-7/cta-testing/x86_64/
Please keep in mind that we haven’t started deploying 5.10.10.1-1 yet. Therefore, these might have some undetected issues.
Anyway, as Michael mentioned, the version that we plan to use for the migration from CentOS-7 to Alma-9 is the 5.10.10.x. We recommend other sites to do the same.
Best regards,
Joao
Hi Joao,
Many thanks for this.
I will start testing the installation of these rpms. I will need some info on the OIC and Ceph dependencies to proceed and I have opened another thread for this.
Best,
George
Sorry, I forgot to ask. Re the versions 5.10.10.0-1 and 5.10.10.1-1 that you have put in the EL9 testing repo: what is the EOS version that you recommend to run with them?
George
Hello George,
Np. With those versions we are using EOS version 5.2.21-1.
Best regards,
Joao
Many thanks for this Joao.
Best,
George
Hi,
I noticed that all the packages in the Alma 9 testing repo have ‘el9’ twice in the filename. This isn’t the case for the el7 packages. Is this intentional or a build error?
-Tim
Hello Tim,
Yes, this is intentional 
It’s more for internal use, because it allows us to distinguish between el7 and el9 deployments in our monitoring systems. However, other sites might find it also useful for the same reason if they want to gradually upgrade their hosts to Alma9.
Once we stop releasing CentOS 7 RPMs, we will no longer need the el9 suffix for Alma9, so we will drop it.
One more question: It looks like the CTA EL7 repos were rebuilt last week (timestamps of 2024-05-22). Since that time, the yum configs on our systems have been broken.
https://cta-public-repo.web.cern.ch/cta-5/el-7/cta/x86_64/repodata/repomd.xml: [Errno 14] HTTPS Error 404 - Not Found
Index of /cta-5/el-7/cta/x86_64 exists, so it looks to me like the repodata was created one level up rather than in this directory. Can you resolve this? Thanks!
Hi Tim,
could you please clarify: For the old cta-el7 repositories, were you successfully using them with the structure as described by https://cta-public-repo.web.cern.ch/cta-5/el-7/cta/x86_64/repodata/repomd.xml in the past? If yes, when did you configure it to be so?
I ask because for the el-7 ones, the convention has been to have the repodata directory one level up, on the same level of the architecture. So (while probably not good practice, as you point out), the repodata should indeed be found at https://cta-public-repo.web.cern.ch/cta-5/el-7/cta/repodata/, where it is now.
We have amended this for the new AlmaLinux9 repositories, putting the repodata/ on the level below the architecture, but decided to keep the old structure as-is, in order to prevent breakage.
Hi Richard,
Yes, this was previously working for us. We had configured it this way several months ago. Our yum processes and Puppet runs began breaking when this changed.
Since we are moving to AlmaLinux 9 shortly, this is not a big deal, but I thought it was worth mentioning to see if it was intentional.
Strange, the structure as it is now matches with the one described in an internal ticket we created 4 months ago to discuss the adjustments needed for the new one, but it is possible that we during an update inadvertently cleaned up other directories or symlinks. Apologies for the trouble.
We’ll keep this one as is for now then, and please let us know if you see issues with the Alma9+ repos as well.
Hi,
We are trying to install a new CTA instance on Alma 9. We see that the cta-release package has a dependency on the yum-plugin-priorities.
If we are not mistaken, the yum-plugin-priorities is built into dnf and does not require an additional installation with Alma 9.
If this dependency is correct, could you please let us know how you solved this?
Thanks in advance,
Esther
Hi Esther,
Welcome to the CTA community
Thank you for communicating this problem. It seems that the cta-release package got broken during our transition from CentOS-7 to Alma-9, and we failed to identify it.
We will work on a patch release that fixes this problem. It will be released as soon as possible (maybe this or next week): Issue link
In the meanwhile, keep it mind that the cta-release package is not a hard dependency for a CTA installation.
It aims to make the installation much easier, by providing all the necessary .repo files, a versionlock file for some dependencies, as well as a few configurations that are no longer needed for Alma9.
But you can always proceed with the installation of CTA without using it. You may just need some extra configuration steps.
If you decide to proceed with the installation of this version, please let us know in case you face any issues.
Best,
Joao