Am I going to be able to use rhel8 for the labs in LFS253?

dwolfe

Taking the Cloud engineer bootcamp classes and used rhel8 in LFS201, LFS211 just fine. I am just starting LFS253, in lab 2.1, and already having difficulty. The instructions are very Ubuntu specific. I was able to install container-tools, using dnf, but it is a package group, not a package, and I can't find an lscgroup command.

With minimal research, I see Red Hat has abandoned Docker in rhel8 and are going a different direction. Am I going to be able to use rhel8 for the labs in LFS253? If so, what will I have to know and do differently to successfully complete the labs?

luisviveropena

Hi Don,

I would like to emphasize what Chris said: LFS253 is not all about Docker. For the Docker specifics -not available and supported by Red Hat 8 (that's a fact)- you can use Podman instead. There are important differences between these two implementations, but none or almost none from the perspective of the tool.

So, you can try and verify it by yourself. And I also want to share this article with you:

https://cloudnweb.dev/2019/06/replacing-docker-with-podman-power-of-podman/

I hope that helps.

Many regards,
Luis.

coop

Most of the courses in these bootcamps were developed independently. LFS201 and LFS211 will work equally well on any major Enterprise distribution -- and the LFCS and LFCE exams can be given on either CentOS 7 at present, and Ubuntu 18.04 -- with CentOS 8 and Ubuntu 20.04 coming soon.

The CKA and CKAD exams do not require a specific platform and neither does LFD259 or LFS258, although you might get more out of it on a native Linux platform.

So technically you are not using an "approved" platform even by using RHEL 8 -- although I know for a fact that there should not be a problem and the courses have pretty much migrated to it even if the exams have not, while keeping RHEL 7 backward compatibility.

As Luis says, Docker is not gone from RHEL/CentOS 8. You should follow the instructions for using docker on it and you probably will not have a real problem, and as Luis says this is a course focused more generally on containers, not Docker. podman will work fine I hope although I cannot promise. I think you should plunge ahead and see what happens. If you have trouble you can always go set up an Ubuntu VM to work with in about 20 minutes, I've done it many times.

coop

I cannot comment on suitabliity of RHEL 8 for LFS253, but to get "lcscgroup" you have to install:

dnf install libcgroup libcgroup-tools

The package names are different than on Ubuntu just so you can have fun. It's a little too strong to say RH has "abandoned docker" -- you can make it work through with a little twiddling, but I'll leave it to the course moderators to tell you what is right for this course. (I think you have to create an empty file called /etc/containers/nodocker , isn't that obvious? )

chrispokorni

Hi @dwolfe,

The course has not been tested on RHEL and there is no guarantee that all exercises will work on RHEL. As you may have already experienced, installation steps, commands and even some behaviors are expected to differ from the Ubuntu environment recommended in Chapter 1, requiring some extra research at times on your end to make things work.

The course focuses on several containerization tools, not only on Docker, and each tool is individually installed. RH may not favor Docker, but they can't really "abandon" altogether one of the most popular container frameworks

Regards,
-Chris

coop

To add to Chris' comments, I know you can do basic docker exercises on RHEL 8 as mentioned above (we do it in LFS201) but anything else might be an adventure whose level of excitement I cannot anticipate well. As to what the future holds while RH is orienting differently....I'm sure there are plenty of opinions out there.

dwolfe

Hi Chris and Coop,
Thank you for your help. I can not find specific documents supporting my statement here, but going to state it anyway -- I was led to believe that the bootcamp was distribution ambivalent, that I could use either Red Hat or Debian based distros. Maybe I misunderstood or jumped to an incorrect conclusion based on statements made with regard to the LFS201/211 classes, but am disappointed that RHEL is not supported. There is vague mention in the lab1.1 in chapter one regarding using Ubuntu in the exercise to setup Google Compute Engine Environment, but I do not see where it recommends it, and it is NOT mentioned in the class requirements section which gives just this:
"System Requirements
Access to a workstation that has Linux, Mac, or Windows installed.
Access to a Linux server or Linux desktop/laptop (if you are not accessing DigitalOcean Cloud)."

Regarding Redhat support for Docker, maybe "abandoned" was a too strong a word, but their Building Running and Managing Containers Guide says "Red Hat did not just remove the Docker container engine from OpenShift. It also removed the Docker container engine, along with the docker command, from Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 entirely. For RHEL 8, Docker is not included and not supported by Red Hat (although it is still available from other sources)."

So, are you recommending I install Ubuntu, and work with that, or is it reasonable to try and work through doing the class with RHEL8? It would benefit me more directly to use RHEL as that is the platform my company has settled on, but I suppose experience with Ubuntu wouldn't be a bad background.

Thanks again,
Don

fcioanca

@dwolfe Also, here is a list with the platforms the exams are provisioned with: https://docs.linuxfoundation.org/tc-docs/certification/lf-candidate-handbook/exam-preparation-checklist#platform-selection-1

chrispokorni

Hi Don,

By working in parallel on both RHEL and Ubuntu you'd most definitely gain an advantage over other learners. Keep in mind, however, that you may encounter minor or even major discrepancies while running an exercise on one distribution vs the other.

The course does not aim to point out differences between Linux distributions, but it presents relevant tools of the containers world on a distribution that aligns the course with, and prepares learners for the following Kubernetes courses and their associated certification exams, CKA and CKAD - all currently on Ubuntu.

I cannot comment on the removal of Docker support by RH, but I see the quote aiming to discourage RHEL users from running Docker.

Regards,
-Chris