XCP-ng 8.3 updates announcements and testing

flakpyro

I took the opportunity to swap out the ssh keys on my hosts yesterday from the default rsa keys over to ed25519 keys. I used Ansible to copy the new key over before running another playbook to remove the old key. Having the ability to use Ansible to mange your hosts at scale is very slick!

gduperrey

Thank you everyone for your tests and your feedback!

The updates are live now: https://xcp-ng.org/blog/2026/03/10/march-2026-maintenance-updates-for-xcp-ng-8-3-lts/

MajorP93

@gduperrey On my pool master there are no updates available in yum repository (checked via "yum check-update").
Will it take some more time?

bnerickson

Just a heads up that the updates to net-snmp-libs will break the lldpd package from epel. I know packages from epel aren't supported and are discouraged, but XCP-ng 9 can't come soon enough . Time to boot up an ancient CentOS 7 VM and create a custom lldpd spec/rpm.

gduperrey

@MajorP93 the diffusion of RPMs across different repositories around the world can take some time depending on your geographical location.

Sometimes a yum clean metadata can also help to clear the cache and better detect updates that have just arrived on certain repositories.

MajorP93

@gduperrey After running "yum clean metadata && yum check-update" the package updates are shown. Thanks.

manilx

@gduperrey Updated 2 pools/2 hosts @home (via cli). 3 pools/5 hosts @office (via RPU).
No issue.

acebmxer

Updated work servers 3 pools 6 host with Rolling Pool Update.

Mitchel-APD

Just updated 1 pool with 3 hosts.
SNMP did not work anymore, config file was not changed.
Got the following error: Authorization Error (SNMP error # 16)
Did a yum downgrade net-snmp*

From:

net-snmp.x86_64 1:5.9.3-8.1.xcpng8.3
net-snmp-agent-libs.x86_64 1:5.9.3-8.1.xcpng8.3
net-snmp-libs.x86_64 1:5.9.3-8.1.xcpng8.3

To:

net-snmp.x86_64 1:5.7.2-52.1.xcpng8.3
net-snmp-agent-libs.x86_64 1:5.7.2-52.1.xcpng8.3
net-snmp-libs.x86_64 1:5.7.2-52.1.xcpng8.3

After a service restart, SNMP worked immediately.

rzr

@Mitchel-APD said:

Just updated 1 pool with 3 hosts.
SNMP did not work anymore, config file was not changed.
Got the following error: Authorization Error (SNMP error # 16)

Thank you for your feedback, we're going to investigate, I see that there are many changes between both versions:

https://github.com/net-snmp/net-snmp/compare/v5.7.2...v5.9.3

semarie

@Mitchel-APD how do you auth on SNMP ? v1, v2, v3 ? and if v3, which authProtocol/privProtocol do you use ?

Mitchel-APD

@semarie Hi,

We are using SNMPv3 with SHA AES

semarie

@Mitchel-APD SHA1 ? I am looking if it is still supported/activated-by-default. I saw that 5.8 added SHA-2 family for RFC-7860 compliance

semarie

SHA`is SHA1. so I assume it is that.
And it seems to be still accepted in authProtocol parameter.

semarie

after testing (with net-snmp-utils 5.9.3), I have no problem with snmpv3 and SHA/AES.

On my testing host, snmpd server (OpenBSD):

User: user1
auth: AES with password123
priv: AES with 321drowssap

From XCP-ng 8.3, with net-snmp-utils 5.9.3:
$ snmpbulkwalk -v3 -a SHA -A password123 -l authPriv -x AES -X 321drowssap -u user1 192.168.1.80

so the net-snmp client itself seems fine with SHA/AES.

could you share more elements ?

Mitchel-APD

@semarie Hi,

Thanks for your help, I just created the user with the net-snmp-create-v3-user command, and definded SHA-256.

SNMP now works like before.

net-snmp-create-v3-user -ro -A verrysecureauthenticationpassword-a SHA-256 -X verrysecureprivacypassword--x AES snmpusername

abudef

Hi, it seems that shutting down the host is taking an extremely long time now. I tried it in two different environments; the shutdown process starts but gets stuck on the splash screen for several minutes before finally completing. There were no active virtual machines on the hosts being shut down.

Does anyone have the possibility to test this in a lab? Thanks!

gduperrey

@abudef I've updated and rebooted numerous hosts with these updates and haven't noticed any significant slowdowns.

Do you have any additional information in the logs?

MajorP93

Can also confirm that I was able to apply this round of patches using rolling update method without any issues or slowdowns on a pool of 5 hosts.

abudef

@gduperrey Restart happens normally, without any noticeable delay, but shutdown takes a long time. Which logs should I specifically check?

(It's not a real issue, but I just needed to move servers in the lab and had to shut them down, so I noticed it.)