After the end of Maintenance Support 2 on June 30, 2024, RHEL 7 will transition
to the Extended life cycle support (ELS) that ends on June 30, 2028.

Acceptance criteria (Updated Mar 12 2024):

• Convert2RHEL allows converting to RHEL 7 ELS
  • The RHEL 7 ELS repo has a different repoid than the standard or EUS ones - `rhel-7-server-els-rpms`
  • There is an --els switch which works the same way as the --eus switch on 8.8 (RHELC-880).
    • If set --els switch enables RHEL 7 ELS target for conversion
    • If not set and the date is later than June 30, 2024, then we print a warning and remind people that they need to use --els switch.

This means that the by default with no switch the conversion after June 30 will still happen to the unsupported RHEL 7 version.

We want to enable the RHEL 7 ELS flow asap, so that we can start testing it. But we may still land last minute changes if there is a need to change the default target.

Access to ELS content

Without an ELS sub we can't access the ELS repo, even with SCA enabled. Rich: "SCA doesn't change the fact that you have to purchase the subs. (It just removes the access management challenges aka attaching a sub, afterwards)". It is an add-on, so to get access to the RHEL 7 ELS repo, one needs to have both a RHEL sub and the ELS add-on purchased (and attached if SCA is disabled).

Staging Candlepin/CDN

We have a c2r_els:cr2_pswd SCA-enabled Ethel account with ELS subs. Here's an example of what to do on a RHEL 7 system to enable the ELS repo:

1. subscription-manager register --serverurl "subscription.rhsm.stage.redhat.com" --username c2r_els --password c2r_pswd --baseurl=stagecdn.redhat.com
2. subscription-manager repos --enable rhel-7-server-els-rpms

Prod Candlepin/CDN

We have a c2r_prod_els production SCA-enabled account with the password in the team's Bitwarden collection.

Note on 204.pem cert

• To get access to the ELS repositories, we don't need to copy an ELS-specific RHSM product certificate 204.pem (RHELDST-22452) to the /etc/pki/product-default folder alongside the standard RHEL 7 product certificate 69.pem. The above is not needed. It's a job of subscription-manager to download the certificate together with a first package installed from the ELS repo. Details: https://redhat-internal.slack.com/archives/CKPULPXL3/p1710795327923399.