Often, updating a Puppet module to work on a newer platform is mostly a case of fixing up a a few paths or package names. Sometimes though, more significant changes are called for. When updating to RHEL (or family) 8, here are some major changes that we’ve had to account for:

• dnf is the new standard package manager.
• Some services only log to systemd now and not to /var/log/*
• X.org has finally been superseded by Wayland.
• iptables has been replaced with nftables.
• The default Python version is now 3.x.
• Replacing ntpd with the new chrony service. Yes, that means you now have cronie and chrony. Good luck keeping those straight!

We’ll come back and update this post as we run into more gotchas.