CentOS 8, MariaDB 10

I know I'm going to sound like a broken record here, but CentOS 8 support seems to have been coming "any day now" since forever. OK, sorry, that's an exaggeration, but a month ago when I was looking at setting up a new VPS (which I had to do on CentOS 7 because Virtualmin isn't ready for 8), it was definitely just around the corner.

And looking through old support tickets people have been begging for MariaDB 10 support since about 2013, the year after it was released.

We now have a perfect storm where support for MariaDB 5.5 runs out in 17 days, but in order to have a reasonably fresh system -- CentOS 8 with MariaDB 10 -- you have to do it without Virtualmin. (I realise there won't be a mushroom cloud on the horizon in 17 days, but that is the date when 5.5 reaches end of life.)

What to do? Can we have a fresh estimate on CentOS 8 support please? Thanks.

Craig

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right now i would switch to ubuntu 18.04 and Cent8 support is still evolving.

Thanks for the suggestion, but I hate working with Ubuntu Server, largely based on the fact that I have been working with RHEL and CentOS for years. Besides, even though 18.04 will be supported for a while, it's already two years old and CentOS 8 only came out late last year.

However, it sure would be nice if Virtualmin people would comment on CentOS 8 with a realistic time line. It's on version 8.1 now. I find it odd that the installer itself states that it supports version 8, but the website still says only 7. Additionally, while the installer completes with only one minor error that can be overcome, once you load Virtualmin the configuration check keeps halting with errors at one step after another (I only went to two), per my last post above, so I stopped my attempt as it's too time-consuming for me to be a beta tester. The forums are full of impatient CentOS 8 posts.

I don't want to be the complaining whiner here, as I know the guys aren't sitting around on their asses doing nothing, but pressure does sometimes need to be brought to bear.

I used to hate ubuntu..but 20.04 is now out..once virt gets support there..then there's no reason to stay on 18.04. Centos is unnecessarily complex in it's repo setup and whatnot..mainly because with IBM now in control their focus is going to shift from GP to vm/containers.

OK. I guess this is why we have choice. What works for me doesn't work for you, and vice-versa. :)

That said, as far as repos are concerned, Red Hat and CentOS (version 7) are still shipping with MariaDB 5, which seems crazy to me, so nobody is perfect.

That's the premise of an enterprise/lts distribution...the versions do not change so applications for enterprise can run for as long as possible without having to be rewritten. Security fixes are still installed into these versions in a process called back porting. Redhat and ubuntu have been doing this for quite a while(Redhat Longer than ubuntu). If you want to stay updated on versions then an LTS/Enterprise version is not what you want to use. That's why I will shift to 20.04 which has php 7.4 into it..and i will run that until 20.04 is supplanted by the next LTS. Sure the version numbers will change but security fixes will be backported...Same for RHEL/Centos.

Well, backporting and enterprise/LTS versions are beyond the scope of this support ticket which is about Virtualmin support of CentOS 8 in particular.

Backporting in particular suffers from poor PR, as most users/clients and even web design people don't look past the version numbers of things like MariaDB, MySQL and PHP. Even I am not willing to go scraping through the CentOS documentation to become an expert on what CVE-IDs have or have not been covered by a particular backport.

Admittedly though, Ubuntu's biennial LTS releases are attractive. There were two of those while CentOS 7 was current.

I haven't tried this lately. Is there actually an answer available for this three-month-old unanswered ticket yet?

Ilia's picture
Submitted by Ilia on Tue, 06/23/2020 - 15:02

We are releasing new Webmin and Virtualmin versions within new few weeks, that will have full support for CentOS 8 and Ubuntu 20.04.

Meanwhile, you can use our latest install script from GitHub repo to get it working.

Additionally, you would need to update MySQL lib for Virtualmin to make things work for MySQL/MariaDB on CentOS 8 before running a post-install wizard by running the following command:

curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/virtualmin/virtualmin-gpl/master/feature-mysql.pl -o /usr/libexec/webmin/virtual-server/feature-mysql.pl

Thanks Ilia. OK, thanks, that's great. It's past time for me to move to CentOS 8, so I look forward to the release.