How to upgrade a SLES VM to a newer SP

[e_ruider]

Hello everyone,

I would like to update my Suse Linux Enterprise Server for SAP 15 SP1 to a newer SP (in this case SP5).

It is a Pay-As-You-Go license so I do not have a registration code.

Whenever I try to use zypper and do operations on the repos, I get one of the following errors:

Problem retrieving files from 'SLE-Module-Basesystem15-SP1-Pool'.
Download (curl) error for 'https://smt-gce.susecloud.net/repo/SUSE/Products/SLE-Module-Basesystem/15-SP1/x86_64/product/repodata/repomd.xml?credentials=Basesystem_Module_x86_64':
Error code: Curl error 60
Error message: SSL certificate problem: unable to get local issuer certificate

 A quick research guided me to do

sudo update-ca-certificates -v

which did not raise any errors. But the aforementioned error persists. So I tried many other things, like trying to re-register without a registration code, but nothing works.

So my question is, is it actually possible to upgrade a PAYG VM instance? If so, is there any exhaustive guide? Do I manually need to add new repos pointing to SP5?

[JuatonCJ]

Hi @e_ruider,

Welcome to Google Cloud Community!

Direct upgrades from SLES 15 GA, SP1, SP2, or SP3 to SLES 15 SP5 are no longer supported. To successfully transition to SLES 15 SP5, you must first upgrade to at least SLES 15 SP4 or to SLES 15 SP2 with LTSS or ESPOS. 

Before proceeding with the SLES upgrade, ensure that you update your SSL Certificate to prevent error codes. For additional guidance on upgrade, requests SSL certificates, refer to the following resources:

• Gcloud app ssl-certificates update
• Issue a certificate using the Google Cloud console
• Request a certificate

After the SSL update, you can now upgrade your current SLES 15 SP1 installation to SLES 15 SP4, as detailed in Upgrading SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 15 SP4. Once that upgrade is complete, you can then follow the instructions in this guide to upgrade to SLES 15 SP5.

I hope the above information is helpful.

[e_ruider]

Hello @JuatonCJ ,

thanks for your input. I am currently not using App Engine in my project, only Compute Engine - do I need to activate App Engine or should I then create a new certificate for Compute Engine, as the update option does not exist there?

[e_ruider · Accepted solution]

To whomever it may concern, I found the solution:

# get current certificate from server
openssl s_client -showcerts -servername smt-gce.susecloud.net -connect smt-gce.susecloud.net:443 </dev/null 2>/dev/null | openssl x509 -outform PEM >~/SUSE.pem

# make backup of old certificate
cp /var/lib/ca-certificates/pem/SUSE.pem /var/lib/ca-certificates/pem/SUSE.pem.bak

# overwrite old certificate with new
cp ~/SUSE.pem /var/lib/ca-certificates/pem/SUSE.pem

# Create symbolic links to files named by the hash values
c_rehash

After entering the commands, I could use zypper again.