[BlueOnyx:24687] Heads up: BlueOnyx mirror update

[Michael Stauber]

Hi all,

Just a small heads-up about an internal reshuffle of BlueOnyx and
Aventurin{e} mirrors:

Our architecture to distribute YUM updates has one pretty important box.
Let's call it "Hail-Mary". It's got another name, but by that nickname
you get the idea how important this one is. Every secondary mirror
updates from this one, which is a fine situation for a rolling failure
cascade if things go wrong during such a move.

That made the whole operation a little tricky to say the least.

Two hours ago I powered down the old 5208R "Hail-Mary" and replaced it
with a 5210R that I had been preparing with a lot of care and
forethought for that purpose over the last couple of weeks.

Everything *should* be working fine and I did some extensive tests
before and after.

The complication was that there are 17 different Vsites on it, all
carrying at least one YUM repository and some Vsites having even eight
different YUM repositories. The quantity of YUM repositories *could*
have been trimmed down, as some of them are for EOL'ed versions of
BlueQuartz (yeah), BlueOnyx and Aventurin{e}. But for historical reasons
I chose to preserve them all for now.

It also runs a PowerDNS DNS-Slave with MariaDB backend and does the
Aventurin{e} license checks and about a dozen PHP scripts for providing
the URLs of the MirrorList outputs for YUM/DNF queries.

Going from 5208R to 5210R meant different paths to the document-roots
and all mirroring scripts needed to be updated. As "yum-arch" is no
longer available on EL8 the mirroring scripts also had to be changed to
use just "createrepo" for updates.

Likewise all PHP scripts had to be updated from PHP-5.4 to at least
PHP-7.2. Which was a major issue for the Aventurin{e} license checker,
which needs PHP with Mcrypt-support. And that meant an update of the
scripts to PHP-7.4 instead.

Likewise a lot of old "baggage" (not directly related to the mirrors)
could finally be retired and the box is now locked down even tighter
than before.

Despite all the precautions and testing there *is* a chance that
*something* related to the mirrors might not work as intended. If you
encounter an issue during YUM updates in the next few days, then please
let me know.

-- 
With best regards

Michael Stauber