CentOS 8 yum update fails with Failed to download metadata for repo appstream

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As of 31st December 2021, CentOS 8 has reached EOL status and will no longer receive any further updates. For users using CentOS 8, that change sparked an immediate discussion about migration options, and/or alternative arrangements for CentOS 8 long term support. in this article we look at available support options for CentOS 8.

To migrate from CentOS 8 and receive updates / security patches, we have 3 available options currently, namely,

• CentOS 8 Stream

• AlmaLinux 8

• Rocky Linux 8

First try to update your CentOS 8

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yum update -y 

Output:

[root@vps ~]# yum update -y
CentOS Linux 8 - AppStream                                                                                        1.5 kB/s |  38  B     00:00    
Error: Failed to download metadata for repo 'appstream': Cannot prepare internal mirrorlist: No URLs in mirrorlist
[root@vps ~]# 

If you get the same error message as above, then you need to migrate your CentSO 8 installation to CentOS 8 Stream or AlmaLinux 8 or RockyLinux 8

How to migrate to CentOS 8 Stream

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sed -i 's/mirrorlist/#mirrorlist/g' /etc/yum.repos.d/CentOS-Linux-*

sed -i 's|#baseurl=http://mirror.centos.org|baseurl=http://vault.centos.org|g' /etc/yum.repos.d/CentOS-Linux-*

dnf install centos-release-stream

dnf swap centos-{linux,stream}-repos

dnf distro-sync

reboot

How to migrate to AlmaLinux 8

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curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/AlmaLinux/almalinux-deploy/master/almalinux-deploy.sh

chmod -v +x almalinux-deploy.sh

bash almalinux-deploy.sh

dnf distro-sync -y

reboot

How to migrate to RockyLinux 8

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curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/rocky-linux/rocky-tools/main/migrate2rocky/migrate2rocky.sh

chmod +x migrate2rocky.sh

bash migrate2rocky.sh  -r

reboot

Done.