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

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?

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Answers

  • coop
    coop Posts: 916

    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? :) )

  • 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 :wink:

    Regards,
    -Chris

  • coop
    coop Posts: 916

    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.

  • 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
    fcioanca Posts: 2,159
    edited September 2020
  • chrispokorni
    chrispokorni Posts: 2,359
    edited September 2020

    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

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