Liberate Formula

The liberate formula migrates systems from EL clients such as AlmaLinux, CentOS 7, Oracle Linux 9, Rocky Linux 9, or even Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 to SUSE Liberty Linux. With this formula the conversion will take place during the client onboarding on SUSE Manager.

The Liberate Formula comes preinstalled within the server container.

1. Configure SUSE Manager

To provide all the software channels for SUSE Liberty Linux on the SUSE Manager Server, proceed as follows.

Procedure: Providing SUSE Customer Center credentials

  1. Sign in to SUSE Customer Center at https://scc.suse.com.

  2. Navigate to My Organization, and select your organization.

  3. Navigate to Users  Organization Credentials and take note of your organization username and password.

  4. In the SUSE Manager Web UI, navigate to Admin  Setup Wizard  Organization Credentials to add the credentials to your SUSE Manager Server.

  5. Click Add new credential, and enter the SUSE Customer Center username and password noted in a previous step.

Procedure: Synchronizing the SLL/SLES-ES channels:

  1. In the SUSE Manager Web UI, navigate to Admin  Setup Wizard  Products

  2. Select the SUSE Liberty Linux Channels that you will use:

    • EL7 LTSS: SUSE Linux Enterprise Server with Expanded Support LTSS 7 x86_64

    • EL7: SUSE Linux Enterprise Server with Expanded Support 7 x86_64

    • EL8: RHEL or SLES ES or CentOS 8 Base

    • EL9: RHEL and Liberty 9 Base

  3. Click the top right button Add products.

Initial sychronization can take considerable time. You can check progress by accessing the server machine via SSH and monitoring the logs using:

tail -f /var/log/rhn/reposync/*
Procedure: Creating one Activation Key per SUSE Liberty Linux parent channel

  1. Note: Activation Keys are the way to register systems and automatically assign them to the required software and configuration channels corresponding to them.

  2. In the SUSE Manager Web UI, navigate to Systems  Activation Keys, and click the top right button Create key.

  3. In the Activation Key dialog, set the fields:

    Description

    Enter some text describing the activation key.

    Key

    Enter the identifier of the key. For example [literalsll9-default for EL 9 systems. Note: Keys will have a numeric prefix depending on the organization, so that they are unique.

    Usage

    Leave blank.

    Base Channel

    Select one base channel:

    • EL7 LTSS: RES-7-LTSS-Updates for x86_64

    • EL7: RHEL x86_64 Server 7

    • EL8: RHEL8-Pool for x86_64

    • EL9: EL9-Pool for x86_64

    Child Channel

    Include all child channels.

    Add-On system type

    Leave all blank.

    Contact Method

    Default

    Universal Default

    Leave unchecked.

  4. Click Create Activation Key.

2. Add Liberate formula and assign it to activation keys

When installed, the formula can be assigned to an Activation Key by creating a System Group:

Procedure: Assigning system group and assigning liberate formula

  1. In the SUSE Manager Web UI, navigate to Systems  System Groups, and click the Create Group button in top right corner.

  2. In the dialog, fill in the following data:

    Name

    liberate

    Description

    Systems to be converted to SUSE Liberty Linux

  3. From the liberate System Group page, navigate go to the Formulas tab.

  4. Select the Liberate formula, and click Save. A new tab called Liberate will appear.

  5. On the Liberate tab, you see the Reinstall all packages after conversion option. Keep it checked if you want to reinstall all the packages during the migration. This way you ensure all the packages will have SUSE signatures and no previous package will be kept. If you do not want to change the state of your system during the migration, uncheck this option and click the Save Formula button. In this case, you can re-install the packages later.

Now a system group exists that has assigned the Liberate formula. This formula will be applied only once to migrate the system to SUSE Liberty Linux, even if you run it multiple times. With the next procedure, assign the system group to the Activation Key.

Procedure: Assigning the system group to the Activation Key

  1. In the SUSE Manager Web UI, navigate to Systems  Activation Keys.

  2. Select the Activation Key, for example sll9-default for the EL 9 systems.

  3. From the Activation Key page navigate to the Groups  Join tab, select the liberate group, and click the Join Selected Groups button. The group will be assigned to the Activation Key

Procedure: Applying migrate directly during registration

  1. From the Activation Key page, navigate to the Details tab.

  2. Navigate to the Configuration File Deployment section, and checkb the Deploy configuration files to systems on registrationoption.

  3. Click Update Activation Key.

When you register a system with this key it will perform the migration automatically.

3. Register a new system and proceed to the migration

There are two ways to onboard (or register) a new client with the Activation Key:

Register Clients with the Web UI

This is intended for a one-off registration or for testing purposes.

Register Clients with a Bootstrap Script

This is intended to be used for mass registration.

4. For already registered clients

Software channels, system group membership, and formulas can be assigned to any already registered client. This method makes use of the bootstrap script mentioned above.

Procedure: Creating an Reactivation key

  1. In the SUSE Manager Web UI, open the System Details page of any registered client you want to migrate to SUSE Liberty Linux.

  2. Click the Reactivation tab. If there is already a key listed, you can use it. If not, click Generate New Key, and copy the entire key. The key will start with re-.

  3. SSH into this client and set the environment variable to be the key that you copied:

    export REACTIVATION_KEY=re-xxxxxxxxxxxxxx

  4. Run the bootstrap script from Register Clients with a Bootstrap Script, and the system will re-register using the same profile as before, but with the newly assigned SUSE Liberty Linux context.