Welcome to my "convert to RHEL8" blog. As you might know, I have been running
Red Hat, SL and CentOS machines for about 25 years now. Lacking SL-8,
latest incarnation of this series is CentOS-8 and now powers-that-be
instruct us to use RHEL-8 instead. So,

Here we go. Conversion from CentOS-8 to RHEL-8 in 5 easy steps.

Main announcement of "16 free RHEL subscriptions" per "developer":
https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__www.redhat.com_en_blog_new-2Dyear-2Dnew-2Dred-2Dhat-2Denterprise-2Dlinux-2Dprograms-2Deasier-2Dways-2Daccess-2Drhel-3Fsource-3Dblogchannel-26channel-3Dblog_channel_red-2Dhat-2Denterprise-2Dlinux&d=DwIDAw&c=gRgGjJ3BkIsb5y6s49QqsA&r=gd8BzeSQcySVxr0gDWSEbN-P-pgDXkdyCtaMqdCgPPdW1cyL5RIpaIYrCn8C5x2A&m=IBWdeVmMPbkgwCr8Ir6R307eFH3-2aZ9vYnQ7mEhhHM&s=Nr6cQ40qpd7tUZVaiCs5XQ0MyOB6xi3VeKjzLmSVuYQ&e= 

I do have a RedHat developer account. A few weeks ago, there was nothing there,
as of a few days ago, there is a "1 active subscriptions" page, as of today,
there is a "using 0 out of 16 entitlements" page. (I do not see any
email notices about all this activity and I do not see any blog messages
about this. So communications can be improved).

I also see a link to download RHEL8 ISO and DVD images, I did not try it yet.

So far so good.

BTW, when logging into the RedHat developer account, there is a number
of click-through agreements to "agree" with. Read them. If you
do not like them, tough!

Instructions for converting CentOS to RHEL are posted here:
https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__access.redhat.com_articles_2360841&d=DwIDAw&c=gRgGjJ3BkIsb5y6s49QqsA&r=gd8BzeSQcySVxr0gDWSEbN-P-pgDXkdyCtaMqdCgPPdW1cyL5RIpaIYrCn8C5x2A&m=IBWdeVmMPbkgwCr8Ir6R307eFH3-2aZ9vYnQ7mEhhHM&s=Hhj0voUDSXlQKw63jIuVJYcerY5Bmru62tOJwbHKuMk&e= 

They start with "hire Red Hat to do the job" (fair is fair, nothing better
than expert help!), and move to the Convert2RHEL tool.

This tool, at https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__github.com_oamg_convert2rhel_&d=DwIDAw&c=gRgGjJ3BkIsb5y6s49QqsA&r=gd8BzeSQcySVxr0gDWSEbN-P-pgDXkdyCtaMqdCgPPdW1cyL5RIpaIYrCn8C5x2A&m=IBWdeVmMPbkgwCr8Ir6R307eFH3-2aZ9vYnQ7mEhhHM&s=abbG4Y8cEtfUdozsmDGSszrCG5MueYPy9xL-1FiW348&e= , does not appear to be
an official Red Hat or CentOS product and I see only one author/maintainer listed,
from Vsetín/Czech Republic. A tool directly developed and maintained by RedHat/CentOS
would have been much preferred, especially by those worrying about "supply-chain" integrity.

convert2rhel-0.15-1.el8.noarch.rpm from github is not signed, not even by the author,
so the chain of trust going from "everything signed by centos" to "everything is signed by redhat"
is not preserved. The possibility of downloading and running a trojaned conversion
script is not eliminated.

Next, I see this: "Known issues: UEFI-based systems cannot currently be converted to RHEL. (BZ#1899314)",
I am not sure if my CentOS-8 test system uses UEFI or Legacy boot, but I am not worries
about this, fixing "broken grub" boot problems is routine. As likely as not I will
replace the grub2 boot loader with syslinux, which is much more stable and also easy to debug.

Next, I do not see in the instructions the step for obtaining and installing
a Red Hat subscription activation key. I assume I get the activation key
somewhere in my Red Hat developer account, but I did not find the button
to do this yet, and I do not know what to do with the activation key anyway.

To be continued...

-- 
Konstantin Olchanski
Data Acquisition Systems: The Bytes Must Flow!
Email: olchansk-at-triumf-dot-ca
Snail mail: 4004 Wesbrook Mall, TRIUMF, Vancouver, B.C., V6T 2A3, Canada