[CI] What foreman version to test on what OS(es)?

[pmoravec]

Followup from #3870 (comment) : currently, foreman integration tests runs foreman 3.7 on Debian, while that version has been dropped there.

We should bump foreman release to 3.9 or 3.12 (my rule of thumb to be in par with Red Hat Satellite releases, where Sat6.14 runs foreman 3.7, 6.15 runs 3.9 and 6.16 runs 3.12).

(please correct my statements in this paragraph, I am not certain with some points) Also, it might be beneficial to run some tests (also) on some Red Hat distro, to catch potential distro-specific issues (and also due to the fact foreman related plugins are mostly utilized on Red Hat distros due to Satellite product - please correct me if foreman is often used on Debian/Ubuntu). We moved from CentOS 8 to Debian due to the CentOS 8 drop (I think), while currently foreman is supported on 8 and 9. Would it be possible to have foreman integration tests on CentOS 9? I know it should be me who knows this answer :) , but.. I dont know now (I can investigate).

[arif-ali]

I have opened a PR #3871 temporarily to fix CI issues for 3.7 by using the archivedeb instead of deb

3.8 doesn't work with the current tests for bullseye (which I tested), so will need some work to get resolved.

[arif-ali]

there was a discussion in #3642 around testing RHEL based OS, we could choose between rocky or alma and that way we have a distro similar to RHEL and you should get the best results, right?

That discussion is still open, unless we have GCE images available for RHEL we can use for testing purposes

[jcastill]

We are actually investigating how to add RHEL images to GCE, and if we want to expand our use of CentOS Stream images in parallel. Hopefully we'll have some news about that by next year

[arif-ali]

@jcastill there are images for rhel in GCE already as shown in https://gcloud-compute.com/images.html, as per the screenshot below. Could we not use these?

[jcastill]

Last time we checked, the RHEL images come at an extra price, so we need to have it approved before using them.
There's a way to avoid this, using subscription details directly, but that's part of the conversation at the moment.

[TurboTurtle]

The solution to the RHEL images pricing problem is the same as it has been for years.

The sos project, which rolls up under the Red Hat Support parent organization (which may roll up into another parent org? I can't remember), needs to enable Cloud Access at the account level. It's an account level, one-time change, that I had been trying to get done for months when I left RH, but there was complete silence from the internal contacts I had (from what I understood, those who had full admin access to the parent account that our GCE account is under). The major issue in the process is that Cloud Access typically involves a TAM (maybe a CSAM?) which we obviously do not have - Cloud Access was only ever scoped for external customers.