End of life operating systems

[MarkEWaite (Mark Waite)]

@marklenders

I have several agents connected to the controller, some of them running CentOS7.
If I upgrade the controller to RHEL8 will the CentOS7 agents still continue to work or will I necessarily have to migrate them to RHEL8 as well?

Nov 16, 2023 is the end of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 and CentOS 7 support by the Jenkins project for controllers and agents. June 30, 2024 is the end of public support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 by Red Hat and the end of all support for CentOS 7.

You should update your agents to a supported operating system. If you can’t do that, then you’ll need to test each upgrade yourself to see that it does not break your agents running CentOS 7.

I’m confident that there is a way to run Java 7 on RHEL 8 and its derivatives, even if there is not an RPM package that can be used for the installation.

[Yeroc (Corey)]

This caught me off guard since our controller isn’t affected but our agents are running CentOS 7 and we didn’t get any advance warning on this until I read the changes for the latest LTS release! Is there an enhancement request somewhere for future releases so that advance warning is provided when the OS the agent(s) are running on has been deprecated or support is due to be dropped?

[MarkEWaite (Mark Waite)]

@Yeroc

Is there an enhancement request somewhere for future releases so that advance warning is provided when the OS the agent(s) are running on has been deprecated or support is due to be dropped?

That’s a good suggestion, though I think it might be better done in the versions node monitors plugin than in Jenkins core. You’re welcome to submit an enhancement request. You’re also welcome to submit a pull request to implement the enhancement

I think that it is better suited to the plugin because agents come and go and an administrative monitor persists until it is cleared. It might be unclear to the user when an ephemeral agent appears, has an unsupported operating system, then disappears, but the administrative monitor persists.

You may also want to read the Jenkins blog post where we announced that change in May 2023.

End of life operating systems

[martin-rust]

Jenkins 2.414.3 just cautions me that “Jenkins will no longer support Linux after 2099-12-31”. It’s a Jenkins WAR deployment inside Tomcat 9.0.82, OpenJDK 11, Fedora 38.
And, yes, the system date is set correctly
If you want to debug this, tell if you need additional information.

[MarkEWaite (Mark Waite)]

@martin-rust

If you want to debug this, tell if you need additional information.

We’ll definitely need more information. It is best to provide detailed information as a bug report to https://issues.jenkins.io/

I attempted to duplicate the problem with the following Dockerfile:

FROM fedora:38
RUN curl -o /etc/yum.repos.d/jenkins.repo https://pkg.jenkins.io/redhat-stable/jenkins.repo
RUN rpm --import https://pkg.jenkins.io/redhat-stable/jenkins.io-2023.key
RUN dnf upgrade -y
RUN dnf install -y fontconfig java-11-openjdk
RUN dnf install -y jenkins
RUN curl -L -o /tmp/jenkins-2.414.3.war https://get.jenkins.io/war-stable/2.414.3/jenkins.war
USER jenkins
ENTRYPOINT java -jar /tmp/jenkins-2.414.3.war

I built and ran that Dockerfile with the command:

$ docker build -t sample:1 .
$ docker run --rm -p 8080:8080 -i -t sample:1

I opened that Jenkins page from that machine in my web browser and confirmed that the end of life admin monitor displayed as follows:

That output is what I expected to see, since Fedora 38 is end of life as of 18 May 2024.

[martin-rust]

After upgrading to Jenkins 2.426.1, the notice has changed to the one just shown in your screenshot (which makes sense). So, I’ll regard this as fixed. Thanks.