5210R/5211R: ISO images updated

Updated ISO and disk images for BlueOnyx 5210R and 5211R have been published. BlueOnyx 5212R development has started.

We just published new BlueOnyx 5210R and BlueOnyx 5211R ISO images that include all updates as of today. Likewise: Updated Aventurin{e} 6110R and Incus images have also been released today.

These images already include many important fixes and updates since the last install media releases.

Short summary of the updates:

As you might have noticed, we've been a bit busy with publishing BlueOnyx 5210R/5211R YUM updates in the last four weeks. Some of these are bugfixes, like the updated Easy-Migrate which fixes a WebApp database migration issue. Others are feature-upgrades, such as the YUM updater that's built into the GUI. That one got overhauled to use newer GUI methods. When you now launch a YUM/DNF update via the GUI, that process is "shot" into the background and the little activity "spinner" at the top will get busy and will tell you that the YUM/DNF update is running. When it eventually stops, then you know that the YUM/DNF update is done.

We also recently overhauled the PHP-FPM integration of BlueOnyx 5210R/5211R to no longer use TCP/IP ports on localhost for every FPM pool. Instead we now use Unix sockets, which solves the sporadic issues of ports not being available or otherwise being in usage.

Lastly, base-alpine and the BlueOnyx login page got a small handling overhaul to better deal with CSRF and/or sessionId cookie timeouts. We also disabled the ACL caching for GUI users for the time being, as the time savings weren't worth the hassles that come with caching critical information that might change during PKG installs.

BlueOnyx 5212R development

The BETA for RHEL10 has been released recently and therefore we've started the preliminary steps for the development of BlueOnyx 5212R. All in all the RHEL10 BETA is again a mixed bag and it's not really worth our time to start using it as build box for anything BlueOnyx 5212R related. There is just way too much stuff missing and we'd end up chasing (and building them ourselves) hundreds of dependencies. Which would be a multi-month effort. We did that with 5210R for EL8 and 5211R for EL9 and it was essentially a waste of time.

Instead we're taking it slower this time around.

We examined the RHEL10 BETA thoroughly as it gives us an idea what to expect. There are no real surprises there. We get at least PHP-8.3 or better, Sendmail is gone for good and a couple of services and libraries are available in newer versions. That's it mostly - as far as we're concerned.

From the GUI side of things it means that we need to upgrade base-alpine to provide a newer PHP-8.3 ready CodeIgniter and an AdmServ-PHP-FPM v8.3 at least. And we need to make sure that the rest of the GUI modules work with both the newer PHP and the newer CodeIgniter. This preliminary work has already been completed and we have a test server with AdmServ-PHP-FPM v8.3 and a fully updated CodeIgniter v4.5.5. The latter also works with PHP-8.1, so we can already port this back to 5210R/5211R in the following days after some more extensive testing.

I haven't seen an official estimate as of when RHEL 10 will be officially released, but if things go their usual flow, we'll see it at the end of Q1 2025 or thereabouts. It can be assumed that an AlmaLinux 10 and RockyLinux 10 will be available shortly thereafter. And when one or the other comes out, we jump-start the BlueOnyx 5212R development and go full bore on it until it's done.

But until then we just tie up some loose ends, make some preps and will continue to improve BlueOnyx 5210R and BlueOnyx 5211R.