Repository IDs for RHEL 7 in AWS Have Changed

Originally, Yum repositories on RHEL-7 AWS instances used RHUI 2 and had IDs that started with rhui-REGION-rhel-server-. In RHUI 3, which was successively launched in all AWS regions in mid-2019, the naming scheme for Yum repository IDs is different. As a consequence, customers' commands that rely on the original IDs may stop working, and it may be necessary to update them.

At the same time, when an instance switches from RHUI 2 to 3, repositories get enabled or disabled based on the default settings for RHUI 3, so any custom changes previously made to the configuration are not honored and get reverted.

Affected instances include those that have been launched from recent RHEL-7 AMIs and those where the rh-amazon-rhui-client package has been updated from version 2.x.y to version 3.x.y. In the latter case, the original configuration gets saved in the /etc/yum.repos.d/redhat-rhui.repo.rpmsavefile and can be restored: repositories can be enabled and disabled again according to the saved configuration. To restore your repository settings, use the rhui-restore-repos utility, which has been part of the rh-amazon-rhui-client package since version 3.0.23 or which you can download from this article; the downloadable file ends with .py.txt because a file without an extension could not be attached to this article, and to allow the utility to be displayed in the browser directly.

The following table provides the corresponding new IDs for all the original IDs, plus the IDs of the repositories that are only available in RHUI 3.

Only a few basic repositories are enabled by default in both RHUI versions. If you wish to enable or disable a repository on an instance that uses RHUI 3, be sure to use the new repository ID in your scripts or on the command line. Also, as mentioned earlier, if you have previously enabled or disabled selected repositories, you can override the default settings and enable your preferred repositories using the rhui-restore-repos utility.

Note that the original naming scheme has been preserved in RHUI 3 for RHEL-6 instances. Recent RHEL-8 instances use the new naming scheme.

Also note that in rh-amazon-rhui-client version 3.0.x, where 0 < x < 19, repository IDs started with rhui- (but did not contain REGION). The rhui-restore-repos utility can also handle this temporary naming scheme and restore information about enabled and disabled repositories using a .rpmsave file created from the affected versions of rh-amazon-rhui-client.

If you no longer have the /etc/yum.repos.d/redhat-rhui.repo.rpmsave file but you have a backup copy of the /etc/yum.repos.d/redhat-rhui.repo file elsewhere, specify the location of the backup file as the parameter of the --oldrepo option on the rhui-restore-repos command line.