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Red Hat Announces Product EOL Calendar
BrunoC writes "Looks like Red Hat is getting a little Microsoftish and is quietly introducing its brand new 12-month-only Errata. Quoting The Reg: 'Red Hat's current death list EOLs RH 7.1-8.0 at the end of this year, while 6.2 and 7.0 get theirs as of the end of March.' You can read the whole article here." I don't see how this is "Microsoftish" -- the code Red Hat creates or includes is still GPL, and you can pay anyone willing to fix it. They're not required to support it forever :)
They are a company afterall. You can't expect them to support all their products for an indefinite amount of time. They would go bankrupt!
seeing that i really enjoy using the most archaic versions of redhat i can get my dirty little hands on. i mean, i see how they are of some use, but i dont understand while people are getting antsy and making m$ related accusations...
xao
xao
http://TheHillforum.hopto.org
Do you enjoy posting articles that contain flamebait?
isn't this old news? I could swear I read about something like this in their "Under the Brim" newsletter at least a month ago.... oh, well. (shrugs)
C|N>K
Pardon me, but if using short product support policies is "microsoftish", then Redhat is more microsoftish than Microsoft itself. Last time I checked, support for Windows 95 was dropped on December 31 and support for Win2000 will be dropped in 2008. That's 8 YEARS per product with a possibility of extening support for corporate customers.
I do not recall Redhat supporting any of their distro releases for 8 years.
noob - "I am having a problem with USB..."
RH person - "What version are you using?"
noob - "Uhh... version 5.0 I think..."
RH person - "FUCK OFF AND UPDATE YOUR SHIT MAN!!! IT IS FREE!!!"
Yet this is the very thing that Microsoft has been vilified for to no end in the past. Are we having short-term memory problems now?
Since Slashdot's search tool is pretty much unusable I couldn't find the article, but there was one a few months ago about how evil Microsoft was for announcing support cutoff dates for for Win95, 98/ME, NT4 and W2K.
It isn't like anyone was paying for their distros anyway.
The whole concept behind Open Source is that selling service is the way to make money. However, when no one is paying you and demanding your services even still, there's got to come a point where you realize that your "customers" are simply taking advantage of you.
Bravo, Redhat. For finally realizing that money doesn't come from beggars. Now maybe my RHAT shares will be a shit.
I have been pwned because my
Here is an example of the rapid advancement expected when utilizing open source development. Proprietary users will think "Retiring a major OS in just a year? That's crazy" - while we Linux users have grown accustomed to such things.
Um, seriously. End-of-lifing a product is just a plain good idea, whether you're talking about open source, closed source, or something that isn't even computer software. In the real world, it costs way too much to keep a support infrastructure in place for a product that is only being used by a small amount of the population due to its having become "obsolete" (even if only as a marketing matter). While it sucks to be one of the people who still uses the product and doesn't want to upgrade, there's really no alternative but to cut people off eventually.
One of the virtues of free software is its rapid development/update cycle. Why would should a company based on this development model sell software as if it were never updated?
I don't see how this is "Microsoftish"
Maybe that's because you don't have to admin anything important. An annual upgrade treadmill is a huge burden on IT staffs that have to prototype and test rollouts for upgrades. There is a reasonable support timeframe between zero and indefinite and one year is not it.
No one pays? My employer shells out a few grand a year for enterprise RHN...
Microsoft also still makes available all the online information (MSKB) for the discontinued OS's.
And its a bit different with redhat, most of the components of old redhat releases are current projects still making releases, theres nothing stopping you from doing the upgrade yourself, chances are if you cant you can prob get your slightly geekier friend to compile and rpm it for you. With windows, think someone is still working on the windows 3.1 version of the networking components?
Jesus saves, everyone else takes full damage from the fireball.
"I don't see how this is "Microsoftish" -- the code Red Hat creates or includes is still GPL, and you can pay anyone willing to fix it. They're not required to support it forever :)"
I think the more important question is. Why is everyone so gung ho about seeing every RH action as "Microsoftish"? As many have already argued RH couldn't be another Microsoft. Has Microsoft scared us all so bad that we jump at the slightest movement by a commercial company? What about all the other commercial companies out there? Aren't they doing something "Microsoftish", or is it just RedHat?
Since three years warranty on server hardware seems to be not uncommon, possibly this is the thin air Redhat seem to have plucked this number from?
It's nice to know that when you get your shiny new 8-way Xeon with untold amounts of RAM you'll be able to leave it in production for the span of its warranty without having to worry about re-installing due to the OS release on it being EOL'ed.
Where this falls down is twofold: 1) servers are still useful well past three years, whether they're warrantied or not, and 2) some vendors for extra money will extend warranties up to five or so years (my employer has started buying Dell boxes with five year warranties pretty much as standard).
Come on, Timothy, that was cheap :-) Of course it's "Microsoft-ish" because it forces companies who want support to upgrade. Yeah, sure, you still have the source code, but in a company that doesn't mean anything if you're not getting support. Half the reason why Red Hat is so popular (over the "free beer" Linuxes like Debian) is because when a company puts it on their systems, they can be assured of getting professional support. This is really important for the PHBs of the world - they don't want to hire some in-house hacker with tattoos and spikey hair to "support" their installation.
Of course, even though it is Microsoft-ish, i don't think that's a bad thing. Forcing your clients to upgrade is better all round - it's better for the economy because it's creating sales which lead to more R&D spending, plus you can ensure your clients are running the latest version which should cut down on the bugginess or flakiness of their software. If Microsoft had had a more aggressive "push upgrades onto the client" scheme, all the internet problems we saw last week wouldn't've happened, because everyone would've been running patched SQL Servers anyway.
I got a sig so you would remember me.
You'll like it better.
Maybe the word 'quietly' is what's microsoftish. But actually Microsoft is quite vocal about end-of-life announcements hoping to spur new sales of the latest product suites. Actually, the poster really should reference Oracle, whom is the master of desupport notices; often on the order of 'this product will self-destruct in ten..nine..'.
I guess Red Hat is being microsoftish by trying to make a profit (maybe someday), or trying to keep the majority of it's users somewhere in the middle of the bell-curve (you spend 90% of your time supporting 10% of your users who refuse to upgrade), or maybe it's the windowsupdate.com like ability to patch over the web.
I think they're more Microsoftish than you may think, and I say 'right on!'.
"This isn't a study in computer science, its a study in human behavior"
One of the major reasons to choose RedHat is their reliability. Thouroughly tested software you can rely to have on your server for at least a year without having to worry about it except for bug- and securityfixes.
Ok, 7.1 is rather old, but discontinuing support for 8.0?
IMO professional distros should always support their latest, and their last major release, so in RedHats case 8.x and 7.3, and not drop support for 7.3 until 9.0 is out.
After all, support is, like, the thing theiy make money in the first place!
my
The thing that comes to mind was the discussion the BMW exec had with a number of attendess at a tech conference. He point out that they are required to support cars with parts, etc for Ten Years. And the obvious question was how may people there were running things that were ten yerars old, nevermind able to get support for it.
Now we get to End of Life issues. How long should software be supported? Ten years for something like software, Is this even reasonable? It's important for the embedded market, at least.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
HAHA, us SuSE users get KDE3.1 early, while you have to wait. Even DEBIAN has released early packages, we get them before the great slashdotting!
Source, SuSE, Conectiva, TurboLinux, Debian and Yoper pacakges, none for shithat, i dont care if you
I think that one of the major beefs against Microsoft is that they require you to PAY to upgrade to the latest version. I don't see that dropping errata support for something that will cost you a grand total of $0 (if you have fast net access) or a few bucks to get new discs from one of the cheapbytes-type places out there.
Personally, I'd rather see them drop the old support in favor of providing a higher level of service to the paying customers. (This isn't a dig on their service, which I think is great - we're paying customers at work, and RHN is a tremendous tool.)
Man somebody mod that trolllll...
Got Code?
A few grand doesn't pay for more than one month of development by one developer. Not even that, if you consider the hidden expenses of running a business (Redhat's business, that is).
That it was for the consumer based products. It also
states that RedHat has been increasing the frequency of it's releases so most people buying the latest cd from Staples will still have their initial phone and e-mail support.
This ISN'T microsoft-ish. Microsoft atleast supports their products for a little while. What this is, is a company screwing the living hell out of the community that's supported it. I've sat here and sold personal version after personal version alot with errata accounts to clients because a) cheaper b) would be supported for quite some time with good security updates and wouldn't always require upgrades to continue to use their other products.
/. apparently didn't like). I've started installing Gentoo on my workstations here already and within the next 4 weeks my redhat boxes will be gone as well.
Now I have to turn around and tell them that Redhat changed it's game plan and convert each one of these clients over, or let them continue to pay me to constantly upgrade their network just to keep them within their errata entitlements. I for one....basically said to hell with redhat about 5 hours ago (incidently right after I submitted my story that
Face it people, the people like "us" have made redhat and they just turned their back on us for the corperate world.
Don't get me wrong, I have NO problem with end of life, but 1 year for what's there now. The woman I spoke with at Redhat (yes I did research it directly with the company not just reading what nimrods say) she said that after this first round, there's going to be another change. Anyone using personal or the "free" version (and probably the professional) will ONLY be eligable for errata during the time that the release they are using is current. As soon as they release another version, errata for the older is gone. In other words, since redhat releases usually twice a year....that would me 2 upgrades a year just to keep yourself up2date. Screw that.
It becomes microsoftish when an upgrade is not a free download away.
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
and you can pay anyone willing to fix it.
If you have the money. Unfortunately many small to medium businesses don't have the money, or shouldn't have the money allocated towards this sort of expense. In many cases it's just cheaper to stay with a reasonable recent version of whatever software you are using.
There is no longer anything that can be done with computers that is nontrivial and clearly legal. -- Paul Phillips
"I don't see how this is "Microsoftish" -- the code Red Hat creates or includes is still GPL, and you can pay anyone willing to fix it. They're not required to support it forever :)"
But isn't that what you're paying RedHat for when you buy support from RedHat? By cutting their support, they're cutting the one service that paying customers actually want (unless they buy the software as a donation). MS just patched NT4, which has been out since '95 or so, and you're criticizing MS and excusing RedHat. Give me a break.
Vote for Pedro
What does it take to perform major version upgrades of Red Hat? Is it possible or easy with their free distribution? E.g. what would it take to upgrade Red Hat 7.0 to a newer version?
I stay (at home) with Gentoo - it doesn't seem to go a proprietary way anytime soon. Redhat might be a good option for enterprise servers, but not for home or SOHO users.
Less is more !
Will I still be able to grab updated packages from rpmfind.net and other places to upgrade programs that have security holes?
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
I don't see how this is "Microsoftish" -- the code Red Hat creates or includes is still GPL, and you can pay anyone willing to fix it. They're not required to support it forever :)
This is editorial, and it is also wrong. Paying people to fix software that is perceived to be 'out of date' just isn't done in the Open Source world.
What's forgotten here is that supporting old versions of software (let's say, Gnome 1.0 vs. Gnome 2.0) and fixing its bugs essentially requires forking the code to do it. You have to have a programmer familiar with the Gnome code, who understands how a 2.0 bug relates to 1.2, fixes it, tests it, and deploys.
Oh, come on, who's going to bother?
Particularly when a bug might be, say, a broken Redhat proprietary script that IS fixed in a later version of Redhat Linux? You can fix it for yourself, and even have it paid for, but nobody else is going to care. You'll even have to have a distribution site, if you want anybody but yourself to reap the benefits. Imagine it: 'Kudzu-for-Redhat-6.3-fixes' on Sourceforge.
I have yet to see a company jumping all over a support model for Redhat 5.x. The fact is, Linux is moving too fast for EOL-ed (even by Redhat Standards) products to be meaningful. The big players like IBM (that drive revenue for distribution companies) want to use the newest Linux features and bugfixes, not waste their time with old versions' bugs.
This argument about old GPL software still being 'supportable' only holds water if you build from source and put newer versions of software on a box. And at that, you get support from the program maintainer at best, not the distributor. At that point, who cares WHAT version of Linux you're using? If you're not using, say, the convenience of prepackaged bugfix RPMs, you're just doing generic Linux and gaining nothing from the convenience of packaging.
When I see, seriously, a company that will support and put liability on the line for 5.x Redhat Linux, I'll believe you. But just saying 'you can pay for support' implies that 1) there are people out there with enough knowledge of the older code to bother, and 2) they're not telling you to upgrade anyway, since it's a collective waste of time in their minds.
Yeah, as the product responsible for Linux I can sure see myself explaining this to my boss (who is very pro-free software): Er, yeah mate. We just hire a bunch of hippies if Red Hat support runs out on the server products we run. I'm sure Oracle will be more then happy to support our home modified kernel sources. Sure a great career move on my side.
Sorry, this is just plain dumb and makes me wonder if Red Hat indeed is a good choice for this company. We are talking of a major divison of one of the biggest logistics companies worldwide.
A one year time frame is just plain unacceptable in a corporate environment.
I think it very much depends how Red Hat handles this on their enterprise level support contracts.
(I read the part about the three year life cycle for their "advanced server" products. Which ,imo are just a scam in the first place).
ich bin der musikant
mit taschenrechner in der hand
kraftwerk
Different things.
MS requiring an upgrade is forced because no one else can support or fix bugs or security issues on old Windows or MS-DOS versions.
Red Hat is just stopping their own support for old versions, but anyone else can fix their bugs or security issues, and support it, because they have the source code to it.
No one's forcing an upgrade on Red Hat's half.
Human nature is the same everywhere; the modes only are different. -- Earl of Chesterfield
I agree with your post. Honestly, I don't generally like much that MS does on the business side, but product support is one that seems _fairly_ reasonable (at least in the OS realm). Really, '95 support just expired...that's a long time to support a piece of junk.
.spec file. Upgrade yourself, or even better, setup your own local RHN server to roll them out for you. You don't have to patch things like Evolution (not installed on your servers anyway, right??) on a server, just the security related errata!
I also don't think that a year is unreasonable for RedHat to support an OS for...especially considering we're talking about Open Source products here. Really, RHN/up2date is nice, but not a necessary component.
There are two things to consider here.
1) Home users: who cares if they have to D/L a new ISO every 12 months...sure, it'll cut into the pr0n allowance, but no biggie (sorry dial-up users, you'll have to shell out $5+shipping for a disc).
2) Corporate users: upgrading servers is a pain. It's done as little as possible. Open Source is great in this situation. Upgrade on a package by package basis. It's fairly easy to build an RPM...especially when a lot of projects include the
And to top it off, corporations should be using Advanced Server anyway, or have the $$ to pay RedHat for some on-the-side support deal...this happens all the time.
Even a non-RedHat supported RedHat is still a very maintainable system.
-Ben
Why not tie the EOL for redhat desktop products to the vailidity of of the RHCE for it? For corporates, its going to be very hard to get approval for certification training if you know the EOL of the product is less than the period of the certification (I recall the figure of 2 major releases being mentioned by the instructor). This could damage RedHat's rep in the training market (one of their key publicity points in the last few years).
I'm surprised that people are still running RH6.0. It's far less secure than 7.x or 8.0. The desktop (and server environment) are much better as well. Sure there are some libc5 legacy apps but there's really no excuse for a server to be running it. Upgrade or do a fresh install and use the newer features (like journalling, LVM, iptables, 2.4 series kernels etc) because they make an immense difference. RH7.2 really should be a minimum if you are serious.
Actually, they're cutting services for the only people who do actually pay for something. Very bad for business.
Vote for Pedro
Stuff doesn't get killed just because of some marketing ploy to sell the latest and greatest.
;-)
When the security team no longer wants to look after your ancient version, you can just do an apt-get upgrade.
Debian don't need no stinkin' deadlines
No... But collectively it adds up. Redhat did go into the black last quarter. They are getting income from somewhere...
That's why it exists.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
and you can pay anyone willing to fix it. They're not required to support it forever :)
Since the code is otherwise free, service is the *only* thing you're paying for - it should be top notch.
http://www.redhat.com/licenses/rhlaws_ita_us.html? location=United+States&
especially the report and auditing section.
I support a lot of redhat machines.I appreciate that they ahve to make money and all, but really. I don't call them and ask for support. i don't use the RHN. i run a mirror.
I did call once and ask for support...I got tossed back to HP!
-- Who is the bigger fool? The fool or the fool who follows him? --
Way back in December LWN covered this and I think Alan Cox voiced his thought that people (not RedHat) may try and make a business out of support 6.2. Now there's an idea...
You sound like you still have quite a bit to learn about how computers work and about software engineering discipline. It's very hard to answer your questions because there are fundamental ideas about software engineering, computer processors, and the history of computers that you just don't know about - this is fine, but it's important to do your research before you repeat anything that you don't absolutely know for certain.
Topics for study include: How Linux came to be - the origins of Red Hat, Slackware, Mandrake, Debian, SuSE, etc.
What is an Operating System?
Open source and how it makes computing more secure. On a related note, try to grok the difference between security and obscurity: the latter is *not* real security.
Assembly language programming for any machine: try to get a good idea of how microprocessors work, at least from the software side of things.
Programming in C, Pascal, Ada, LISP, Perl, Java, ... as many languages as you can learn. It's good to be versatile, and it's good to be able to use the right tool for the right job.
And once you have done all that, you will be able to come up with your own conclusions, you will be the expert. Study hard, you never know, you might be the agent that makes Linux tomorrow's killer OS.
hrm. then again. maybe not.
I really think it's a bit hypoctritical to infer that RedHat is in the wrong by wanting to rid itself of the shackles of 6.x support. Find a bug in any piece of GPL software, and the first thing you'll hear is "We don't want to know unless you compile from the nightly CVS".
If most GPL software (software from GNU itself thankfully excluded) is only supported for 24 hours then I think that both RedHat and Microsoft do a good job in comparison.
I mean, even Linus himself end-of-lifed the fantastic 1.2.13 kernel a long time ago.
..and is quietly introducing its brand new 12-month-only Errata.
"Quietly??" Hardly. I've received notice of this at least three times in the past couple of months from various RH newsletters. I even considered writing to let them know I had gotten the message. It's been on their errata web page for over a month (at least since 8.0 has been out).
I guess this shows you CAN'T count on people to get the message unless you beat it into them, or perhaps this whole article is a RH troll to actually get the message out??
I now expect to receive several other explanatory e-mails from RH after this slashdot article.
RH8.1 isn't even out and they are announcing an EoL for 8.0? What kind of crack are these guys smoking?
It would be awfully nice if they would have something to upgrade TO before planning the end of support for the current line.
Considering that the "autoupdate" stuff in RH doesn't work very well, most upgrades require either backing out current data and rebuilding, or making a new server and moving the data over. This requires hardware and expensive man-hours. So much for that low total-cost-of-ownership that linux is supposed to provide.
Microsoft for keeping us on an upgrade treadmill? The last couple years of constant new distros have been a pain in the ass, frankly I was having a fine time with Red Hat 6.2, and 7.1 was equally pleasant. That alone has pushed Linux to my spare box. It was one thing to have to recompile the kernel every few months, a slightly more painful thing to have to track down all the stuff for a Gnome or KDE upgrade once a year, but one year support cycles are a bit much. I can install any version of Windows, go through the Windows Update process, install Mozilla and be solid for a couple years, barring the regularly scheduled mad dash for security patches. Granted I can do the same thing with virtually any desktop platform and any Linux distro, but those other OS aren't trying to grow a user base to topple the evil empire. I don't really think Red Hat is trying to pull anything evil, just searching for a business model. But this is not the way.
You know, you are SO wrong. Ofc. the beggars(Students, the primary slashdot crowd, etc.) will not mind they now have to upgrade to get supported versions, they do that each other week because they don't have anything else meaningfull to do.
But, in the real world, you just don't upgrade each week. First of all, you don't have the time to do it, second many of your services are so complicated they might break seriously if a patch is applied, and ofc. all of this has to be done on a working live system in a very narrow timeframe, which leaves you very little time for errors.
This is a very poor move, now that Linux has been accepted in the business world. This will clearly throw some people back to Windows, because their lifetime is bigger, and the systems are easier to update. Not that I don't know how to use the patch command, but hey, most people would like just to double-click on SP3 and then wait until it is done.
-H
Timothy commented: :)"
"I don't see how this is "Microsoftish" -- the code Red Hat creates or includes is still GPL, and you can pay anyone willing to fix it. They're not required to support it forever
You know, neither is microsoft. Does this mean Slashdot will officially stop complaining about EOLs from Microsoft?
These sources are generally mirrors of the redhat sources. THis means that unless RH puts out a patch you won't have an "official" redhat patch. This is not to say that your software will be unpatchable (that's the beauty of free software). Generally you'd do this:
Find an updated package from one of the supported versions. Run "rpm --rebuild" (or "rpmbuild --rebuild") and try to rebuild the rpm from source. This works a good portion of the time.
Or
Find an updated rpm package. Find the older, unpatched package. Extract both source rpms. Run a diff against the sources. Use the diff file to patch the version on your machine. This works quite often.
Or
Grab the source tarballs from the new package. Rebuild it without RPM. If you desire, package the files up in your own RPM and contribute it back to the community. This is easier than it sounds and works most of the time.
Or
Find the latest supported RPM for your distro. Install the src.rpm for this file. cd to the RPM build directory. Apply any diffs. Rebuild the src rpm.
Or
Wait until someone does the above and contributes it back to the community. This happens quite often. Bless those folks.
Contrast this to the Microsoft EOL options:
1. Upgrade to the newest version from Microsoft. I.e., no option to continue using the software. You're owned. Pay up. Pay now. No options.
2. Pay Microsoft lots of money to have them support it (year, some companies do this for Win3.1).
Come on RedHat is the MS of the linux world.
Case in point: do an ls -l on your redhat box and then ls -l on almost any other unix box
You will notice that the listing on RedHat is not correct:
RedHat ls:
Aaa
aaa
BBB
Any other would be
Aaa
BBB
aaa
There is quite a number of others things redhat scarifices to be more user friendly(or something)
Don't get me wrong, I am not saying it is bad for business or I hate RedHat, just an observation.
There are many strategic vendors who only release products for specific releases of GNU/Linux, and they often choose RedHat for this. Hence, we have stuff from Oracle, or Java, or Intel/Dialogic that only works on specific (7.2/7.3) RedHat releases, or other products that only directly support older releases. They invested in these releases with the assumption that they were stable long term. If RedHat really chooses to stop providing long term stable support then enterprise users and products will simply stop using RedHat, and this will be a far greater loss to RedHat, and perhaps a major gain for a more enterprise friendly distribution (heaven help us if that proves to be SCO).
It's not like they're killing you because you need to pay $$$$ to upgrade to RedHat 2005. All you need to do is download the new version and upgrade. I do think a year is kind of short ... Like someone said maybe they should support at least the last mayor release.
... 4.7? 4-stable? I don't see them recommending 4.4 to anybody right now, even though it was pretty stable. 4-stable is the recommended Server software until what ... 5.2?
I mean, how does FreeBSD do it? Do "they" fully support 4.0?
In this case, the question is, how long do you give support for a product so that your costumers feel that the upgrade will be stable, after all, it's not like they _have_to_ request PHB for a few grand to upgrade.
All I can say is good for RH, but I would have thought a "previous major version support" would have been better.
Then again, you can always just get the latest stable version of whatever software you need so much (apache? sendmail? vi?). And in the case you're building a new system, why not install the latest stable distro version anyway.
I do understand that people have different requirements, so there are exceptions to everything. I mean, you can always do your own RedHat 5.0 support department if you wish.
cl
Reply . . . let's get it over with.
But the RHCE program is geared towards this same "consumer" release. Current RHCE is for Redhat 8.x version and you have to get recertified every other (consumer) major release number. So, what good is RHCE? You get certified to run your home Linux box then?
...to spell out 'gook'? Come on, mods - are you all using lynx today?
In my hand I hold a receipt from PC World for a copy of Red Hat 8.0 personal edition (listed as REDHATLIN PERSV8), costing £34.99.
Some of us like to support the companies that produce cool products by paying for them.
Note to M1-ers: a curt but otherwise insightful message is not "Flamebait" or "Troll".
I know some sites are still running Solaris 5.2 (which was de-emphasised about 5 years ago). It takes some companies almost a year to get their software really stable. Forcing them to replace their OS on a yearly basis is going to discourage movement to redhat
From a marketing (as well as technical) point of view, theis seem s like a really bad idea(tm).
OS Software is like love: The best way to make it grow is to give it away.
--
We have ~100 customers running RedHat on a product that I support. RHAS would be a good solution if it had a 5 year EOL _and_ if it were reasonably priced. But RedHat wants to charge almost $80K for us to use RHAS.
Come on! That's nuts. I've never called RedHat support. I'm ready to recognize the value of their errata, and I'm ready to pay for it. But not $80K for 100 servers. Maybe $8K.
And so you're running a version of RH that's so old that this announcement will cause you problems (or will be that old by the time the support is actually cut off)? The question is: why?
;)
You do realize that even support costs money to provide and it's quite possible that your "few grand" ain't covering the cost of doing so? I'd say that the RH product management team is smart enough to figure out at what point the revenues on supporting old products don't match the cost to provide that support.
In other news: their software is not only GPL-style-free, but available at no charge. It's not like Microsoft or Apple or Adobe or any other proprietary software company's situation, where you have to pay for the upgrade. So except in some very rare cases, I can't see a reason to run a Linux distro that's over a year old. Given the rate at which Linux software is maturing that seems like a good way to handicap yourself. If you really want to live in the past, try Debian.
I do not have a signature
Or have they just given up on the idea of using Redhat for corporate desktops instead of Windows? Well this policy seals that fate for sure.
There are a ton of companies still running NT 4.0 workstation out there for example.
For support not software. That's why RH isn't pulling a M$. You can upgrade your stuff to 8.x and use your current support policy at no charge. And don't give me this "we can't upgrade our old servers. If it ain't borke don't fix it" b/c those working servers don't need support and if something goes bad worng an upgrade may be the easiest fix.
Why did you put, in bold, the letters g, O, O, and k? Are you calling people gook's? For someone calling the 'M$' people childish (I agree on that point) that seems pretty immature...
Like those who live off M$ crumbs...
... trying to get people to patch their software when the vendor spoon feeds them fixes. (note the recent super virus was exploiting code that had a easily avalable patch). You actually think the majority of these people (or even 1 in 1000) are going to fix their own bugs just because it's Open Source? Even if a fix from another vendor is available? That's some kind of dream land you're in there Timmy.
Hell huge numbers of BIND users are still running unpatched server software and that's Open Source.
I'd say that yes, this is quite "Microsoftish", but even MS supports OS versions for at least 4-5 years.
Contrary to popular belief, coding is not all free blow-jobs and beer. Those things cost MONEY!
Since Redhat doesnt make loads of money exactly from keeping out of date systems alive they havent go any incentive to keep those old systems running. Looking at statistics would probably show that very few run older versions of redhat. You can still use the PRO versions and get longer lifecycles if you run a business. For redhat to keep systems released every year up at no cost isnt good business and we dont want them to go titsup do we?
The incredibly fast development of linux right now is making older versions obsolete very fast. If you want to run something really old you should use debians stable version since it is rock solid and dont tread on the edge like most other distros right now.
HTTP/1.1 400
selling red hair er... hat?
If you disagree with the submitter so much, why did you post it, timothy? Next, you'll be telling us that you knew that the 1991 Xbox guy was faking it all along, but there was nothing you could do but post it anyway.
Ever try to read an old MS Word file in Word 2000 or later? Ever wonder why it looks fucked up?
It's called "Billy's Sharp Stick in the Eye to Make you Upgrade".
What's RH going to do? Pop up an error saying "You "/etc/hosts" file is in an unsupported format! Please upgrade to RH 11!"?!?!
oh yeah, that's definitely flame bait. just like the comment above this one is not flame bate. C'mon, whoever runs this site, have some sort of way that's MORE effective on moderating moderations. they don't give a crap about their moderations as long as they're modding down people who's views conflict with theirs. I don't understand how the above comment is flamebait (or overrated at -1...) this is starting to get ridiculous.
Use Advanced Server as Linux desktops? I thought RH wanted Linux in the desktop too, the reason for last changes and so on... maybe they will release Advanced Desktop, for business. Go figure.
I noticed, posted, and got modded down by some brilliant moderator. I guess I'll take out my anger by incorrectly moderating someone elses posts. Hmm... maybe that's what's wrong with the slashdot community.
I don't think any redhat stock holders would mind seeing them turn a "microsoftish" profit for once.
There are some people that if they don't know, you can't tell 'em.
Shut up gook!
Set locale to C before running ls, like LC_COLLATE=C ls (collate is for ordering, you can use LC_ALL too).
Also, cut it out with the "M$" crap.
Microsoft built its early business on porting its BASIC programming language interpreter to several 8-bit microcomputer platforms and licensing it to the computer manufacturers. In line-numbered BASIC, the name of a variable of type string ends in '$'. A valid program in "Applesoft BASIC" (the BASIC interpreter in the Apple II ROM, developed by Microsoft):
I find using a BASIC expression to refer to a BASIC vendor just as valid as using the pattern *n?x to refer to a family of operating systems whose shells recognize the name of the operating system in that glob pattern.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Some people use CAPS to call attention, BBB or Bbb is more important than aaa for them.
Die chink!
Something to keep in mind here too people is that Red Hat products are upgradable from one release to another. Now, granted upgrades from one major release to another don't always go smoothly, but I've always found them to be repairable by hand if the update fails which sure beats the heck out of the typical reformat and reinstall required for MicroSoft OS upgrades.
So if tech support from Red Hat is important to your organization, consider updating when the support cycle ends for your version.
I've still got one box purring away with 5.2, another running 7.0 and the rest of my boxen at 7.3. All happy clams running what they're capable of with no issues. I can still build packages from source or snag available RPMs for any critical security or bug fixes. It's not like Red Hat's preventing me from doing that. They're just trying to manage their customer support model and remain profitable. Good for them!
RedHat was founded in 1994.
"Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
Perhaps in the real world of beanie-wearing community college graduates, yes. But in the real corporate world, there are testbed servers on which to test upgrades, patches, etc. before rolling them onto the production servers. Often times there are also redundant servers which can be taken down, upgraded, tested, and put live one at a time.
Further - there's no requirement to upgrade once/week, but at the very least keep packages less than one year stale. The Internet as a whole got a kick in the goodies this past weekend by sysadmins who wouldn't patch a software vulnerability that was more than 7 months old (and by the network admins who allowed access to the servers via the public Internet, but I digress).
If you haven't upgraded your Linux systems in 6-12 months, I'd love for you to send me your IP address(es), because I'd like to send you a few packets pertaining to;
Out in the "real world", systems administrators apply patches, fixes, and upgrades to their software regularly to avoid being used as a staging ground for one of our recent many DDoS attacks, or having their corporate data stolen.
It's the lazy, incompetent, certifications-are-king sysadmins out there who give us a bad name. They're the ones who adopt the theory that applying updates is "too hard", and claim that "things could break" which they use to justify their ignorance of best-practises security.
If your company's assets are riding on IT software and you're having trouble keeping up-to-date, talk to your vendor and ask for help. Have them justify the money you fork over to them every year and do something for you. If RedHat is your vendor, ask them for assistance in migrating your server farm from 6.0 to 8.0. If they won't give it to you, inform them that you'll find another vendor, and that you won't be spending $30k on another support contract. If you've already spent it, contact your lawyer.
"Real World" does not, nor should it ever be confused with or used to justify laziness, ignorance, or apathy. It's thinking like that that got us into our present state of dissaray.
BD Phone Home!
Shameless plug. Like you weren't expecting it.
Hey they're still in buissness, supporting all these products may become a pain in the ass for the support team.
Newsflash: "Please reboot your server" isn't "support".
I'd guess RH lost the technical capability to provide support for older releases and simply would not supply "Microsoftish" technical support. What does "ending support mean for M$ anyway? Running "DELETE FROM techsupdb.answers WHERE version 'Win98'" against the answer database for the technical "support" phone bank in Calcutta? Assuming of course the MS SQL server in question hasn't been DOS'd to death...
Actually, RedHat returns them in the correct order. Any other unix box would return them in a wrong yet consistant with past mistakes order. Now, you might argue it's more important to be consistant than right; however, the fact is RedHat is following the basic ordering system used by everyone except computer geeks.
This was announced on 1/22/2003 and I consider it old news, however here is the EOL list if you are interested:
Release EOL DATE
-------------- -------------
RHAS 2.1 -- May 31,2005
RH 7.1 to 8.0 -- Dec. 31, 2003
RH 6.0, 6.2 -- Mar. 31, 2003
RH 6.1 -- Already EOL'ed
This is mostly just a push to get all the serious corporate users to move to Red Hat Advanced Server 2.1, if they want support and errata longevity. For simplification Red Hat has also consolidated the kernels into two code branches, one for the 7.x one for the 8.x release.
One of the disadvantages of spinning out new releases as fast as RedHat is keeping up with the errata and support associated with each version. Speaking of errata, does anyone have a 6.1 system that they can run "up2date" on? I am just curious if it still works after the EOL date.
This new policy dramatically increases the cost of maintaing Red Hat Linux in any business computing environment. I have RH machines with uptimes longer than 12 months.
Given that Red Hat has 6 month release cycles, a lot of people are going to find themselves with software that is to be EOL'd six months after it was installed, when at the time of installation it was the latest and greatest version.
I'm very partial to Red Hat Linux, but this new policy makes me rethink my opinion.
What has *science* done?!? -- Dr. Weird (ATHF)
I have a means to justify using gentoo or debian at work instead of Redhat!!! Not that it's been a bad run or anything with Redhat. I will miss them. Not their 2.96 compiler, but at least the cool logo. Just when they finally got around to switching out 2.96 too.....damn.
If it weren't for their kudzu autodetection tools, projects like knoppix would have had to spend a lot more development time. I'll forgive them for rpm because of kudzu :)
RedHat is one of the first for-profit software companies which has offered a free upgrade path. Deciding to EOL support for older versions makes perfect sense. If the dstribution is free, why support older versions? If I worked in RedHat's support center, I would want to shake the hand of whoever made that descision.
It is truly frightening that an open source company like Red Hat has a license agreement that allows them to perform onsite audits to verify compliance, on a product that essentially is composed of GPL software.
You have to remember a thing like an OS is evolving all of the time. New devices to diddle with; new data structures to deal with, etc. etc.
And old things go away, albeit slowly.
If Microsoft didn't EOL some of it's earlier products, we would still have support for cassette-tape based backups.
The key is not to force the customer into buying new stuff every release. Backdate the support for a few releases, but that is as far as it goes. People still running servers on 486's need to move on!
That said, Linux has an extreme level of upgradability. Using Red Hat specifically, I ran version 5.1 and upgraded it using newer and newer packages and custom kernels. The result, before I decided to restart from scratch, was mostly based on RH 7.
Even a kernel update -- custom or packaged -- usually does not require user level software changes. When it does, the updates are usually backward compatable so you have a fall back option. This means that if someone runs RH 6, and a local exploit or bug is found in the kernel or other software, they can update to a version that will not have the hole.
Is upgading single packages painless? Not necessarily, though the painful parts are usually because of package dependencies with non-critical programs. Having a mix of packages from different 'versions' is entirely possible as long as you handle the upgrades in a conservative manner; update only what is necessary not every package on the system.
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
You bolded 4 letters in your post that taken together spell "gOOk", in answer to someone with an oriental-looking name.
You sir, are a despicable racist troll. Too bad I don't have any moderator points to knock you down to -2.
Moderators, do your duty!
I thought this was supposed to be a pro-linux site?
Timothy completely missed one of the key points - that the "advanced server" version has a 3 year support plan. Its still not great, but to have "Redhat announces 12 month only errata" (or words to that effect on the front page of Slashdot is just going to give Redhat a bad name with the casual observer. We all know how few people actually RTFA...
smash.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
which dictionary are you using there cheif? 1.) No, I am not gay in any way shape or form. 2.) If that comment does not get modded down flamebait, then I seriously doubt the IQ of any person with moderatorship reading that comment is above 12%. 3.) You are most certainly attracting flamers to flame yourself, so that better get modded down flamebait. 4.) what the heck did that comment have to do with anything, and why the heck did you waste 2 minutes of your time saying that? You people have serious issues. How old are you? 9? I'm guessing you're the one who modded me down - get a life, and do something productive with it.
It's suprising that some folks are just now finding this out. I noticed this a while back while trying to get a decent fix for the fubar xinetd package Redhat is pushing on its pre-8.0 distros.
I was really suprised by this since a long lifespan is the one thing that RedHat had over Mandrake (Mandrake's product lifespan is 2 years from date of initial release..) I don't know about the rest of you, but I have servers running right now with 2 years of uptime..some are in the same city as me, some are colocated in other cities. I can't upgrade these systems without either flying to the colocation site or having them mailed to me.
I came to precisely the same conclusion as the folks in this article. If you're using Linux on a server, it's stupid to use anything other than Debian. The commercial distros NEED you to upgrade, whether or not there are any compelling new features in their new versions. The Debian developers could care less about you buying a new set of CDs every six months.
It's pretty funny that RedHat seems to be following right in Mandrake's footsteps here. It will be a great boon for virus writers if they really do drop support for all those 7.2 installs out there...but I can't imagine that serious sysadmins will put up with this for very long.
Real businesses, with thousands of servers, can not upgrade every year. Besides the actual time to do the work of upgrading, there is testing that must be done when you have real money at stake, downtime caused by the upgrade, etc.
I work for a real company. I can't use an unsupported operating system. I can't upgrade every machine every year. I can't even upgrade to the latest and greatest (e.g. RedHat 8 and Solaris 9 are out of the question), because it is too untested. These are the business realities, not factors that I or any other individual have control over. A single incident (e.g. a server crashes and whatever sort of failover is in place does not work) can cost more money than my yearly salary. A single hiccup (e.g. a 1 second network outage for a single machine) can cost more than my paycheck.
Sun at least makes guarantees that binaries that worked on previous versions of Solaris will work on new versions. (If they pass a test suite). RedHat makes no such guarantee.
I thought I was making real progress to replacing Solaris servers with Linux servers. But with this announcement, I don't know what to do. If I deploy RedHat, I am adding a substantial (and mostly hidden) cost and risk. RedHat seemed like the logical choice, but my next course of action is going to be to investigate alternate supported Linux distros (IBM, Sun).
1. be really really queer
2. post flamebait
3. tell us you're rainman
4. complain about mod system
5. insult moderator intelligence
6. ????
7. profit
if I modded you down, my moderations would have been lost once I posted in the thread.
Red hat is doing this because they don't have the resources to support 6 different versions of their O/S full time. These are just errata updates. If having the errata (security, bug fixes, performance issues) is important enough to you that you're going to care, then you can:
(1) Download the latest RH and buy RH support for it (because this is really just about support),
(2) Hire your own admin to stay abreast of these issues, or do it yourself. (But this is why people pay for RH service, so this isn't a likely option, or
(3) Contract out to another company to step in and do errata updates on EOL'd RH distributions. It's legal, but probably expensive, unless a bunch of people band together to do it.
Anyways, as the argument goes for contributing back to the linux codebase . . . It doesn't make any sense for a company to update programs without trying to get their updates put back into the codebase. Same thing is going on here. It doesn't make sense for RH to back-patch all of these older programs just for errata updates. Too much time and effort that could be spent on the real task: creating more advanced and better working programs. You don't see many people doing updates to Linux Kernel 2.0.39 these days, do you? Wonder why that might be. . .
Karma: Not Particularly Funny.
I have no problem with RH or anyone charging money for support. I never use it but if I needed it I would be fine with paying for it. However, sellign service IS NOT the concept behind OSS, it is a consequence of it. There is an important difference.
I'm the big fish in the big pond bitch.
"Sure, and that's exactly the reason why you can't download an .iso of RH Advanced Server. If you want to try it, spit $845."
Or you can go to one of the binary groups and download a copy. Hey! If we can justify it with music, why not software?
I'm not trying to profit myself. I'm trying to knock some intelligence into you microsoft hating retards who think just because MS exists on more computers than all others combined, and is 100x better than anything you could write means that they are evil. I'm doing this for the good of slashdot's future. I know I'll never convince people like you to actually think about something before you post judgements on it, but I want other people to benefit. My prediction is that my karma will never become positive, ever, because of moderators who just don't think about stuff. If you don't agree that comments that are pro-microsoft get modded down a lot more than pro-linux comments, then you need to re-read every single comment on this site. The most intelligent pro-MS comments get modded down simply because it makes MS look good. comments like "linux rules!" get modded up insightful all the time. Again, i am not gay, which is what i'm sure you meant by "queer" - by the real definition of queer (unusual), sure, i am, especially compared to the majority of slashdot visitors. for all i know you switched computers to post your AC comments.
I can under stand Redhats actions as well. I think most people get upset because the MS upgrades happen so frequenctly.
I'm actually a bit suprised; the EOL for 8.0 (the CURRENT release) is only until the end of THIS year? Didn't the damn thing just come out last Sept?? So its total life time is less then one year. WTF?
that would be humility, genius... i was comparing myself to the rest of humanity, which doesn't take a genius to understand that some people are smarter than others, and that intelligence is can be measured, and if my measurements are higher than others, then I'm guessing that i'm intelligent. the human race as a whole is very very stupid.
"Or you can go to one of the binary groups and download a copy. Hey! If we can justify it with music, why not software?"
Good reason why, it's a company versus an individual. Still an end of life in less than 24 months is pretty cruddy.
Man, this stinks. I read it in Red Hat's newsletter but forgot about it until today.
.. now we have to upgrade these production servers? Can I do that over the network? Am I supposed to talk them through it over the phone? It's going to be a huge deal to upgrade all these machines.
Like others here I have convinced several clients to switch their servers to Red Hat Linux. The clients pay us a monthly fee to read the nightly reports as well as pay the cost of a Red Hat Network account. Keeping these machines up to date and secure is a total breeze and MUCH cheaper than the proprietary alternatives, for all involved.
I also chose Red Hat over my usual choice of FreeBSD because of the ease of upgrading (i.e., when a bug comes out, just run up2date, and everything works because Red Hat back-ports patches to keep versions stable).
These clients all have 7.x, including 7.0
And you can bet I'll be upgrading them to FreeBSD (with Linux compat as needed), where upgrades can be done from CVS. Sure, not quite as nice as up2date, and version problems will probably come up, but maybe someone's written something to alleviate the problem.
I like the idea of them supporting the last two major releases (7.x and 8.x right now). If I have to pay more for Red Hat Network support on an older version, I'll do it. But it will be quite a chore to upgrade all these machines to 8.x by the end of this year.
I hope Red Hat comes up with an easy way to upgrade remotely! Otherwise, bye bye Red Hat, and I have to explain to my clients that all that stuff I told them about Red Hat saving everybody money is a bunch of BS.
Main Entry: 1queer
Pronunciation: 'kwir
Function: adjective
Etymology: origin unknown
Date: 1508
1 a : WORTHLESS, COUNTERFEIT b : QUESTIONABLE, SUSPICIOUS
2 a : differing in some odd way from what is usual or normal b (1) : ECCENTRIC, UNCONVENTIONAL (2) : mildly insane : TOUCHED c : absorbed or interested to an extreme or unreasonable degree : OBSESSED d usually disparaging : HOMOSEXUAL
3 : not quite well
who said I hate Microsoft? I just hate little weenies like you that seem to think that something is intelligent simply because it came from your little mind.
your posts are hardly the "most intelligent pro-MS comments", but I'm sure that you'll always think they are. Greek philosophy brings us the wisdom "know thyself", I'd suggest that you follow that, cause none of us care to know you...
But it seems like a really stupid move to me.
Isn't RedHat trying to woo big corporate/enterprise accounts? From what I know of the corp/enterprise attitude (admittedly not a lot), they don't wnat to have to upgrade the whole OS on a yearly basis in order to stay up to date.
I do realize that the packages themselves will very likely be upgraded and that any admin can go get them and apply the updates himself, but isn't up2date and its associated collection of updates in one easy to find place one of the biggest selling points?
How is RedHat not shooting itself in the foot on this one? Someone please explain it to me, I'd really like to know.
Information doesn't want to be anthropomorphized anymore.
noob - "hey but I got my RHCE when it was 5.2!!!"
e x. html
RH person -"can I place you on hold let me talk to my supervisor"
http://www.redhat.com/training/rhce/courses/ind
RHCE certifications on 5.2, 6.0, 6.1, 6.2, 7.0, 7.1, 7.2, 7.3, and 8.0 are all considered current by Red Hat, Inc
i still don't see how anything i did was queer... i never said my posts were intelligent pro-MS comments. and i know for a fact that you hate MS, because why else would you be wasting your time arguing with me?
sorry, i just have to bring this up again... was this you?: it's flamebait cause you're a flaming homosexual. ...? i still don't see how you arrived at that conclusion... and why anything would be modded down flamebait because of that...
You missed one category:
3) Educational users: upgrading our servers is also a pain. We do it as little as possible. Our main server is still running 6.2. I am in the process of replacing it with an 8.0 server, but it takes a lot of time. We cannot afford Advanced Server. We are going to be left out in the cold.
I do support Red Hat however I can. I buy RH Pro for each release. That is about the limit of our budget.
You're assuming that every computer on the planet is a web server. I can guarantee that web servers for most companies are less important that most secretaries' machines, and I can guarantee you further that there are many, many critical machines that are not on the Net. You think that a CNC machine manufacturer gives a flying shit about Apache or BIND patches? No. They want an OS that they can embed, and if something bizarre comes up when they try to use a new control panel, that they can call the company and get the problem fixed. Fuck web servers. Unless you're EBay or Amazon or Yahoo, they're not critical.
because you're an annoying idiot, in my opinion.
as for your "fact", I personally admire Bill Gates and his achievements. MS(along with Unix and Apple) has shaped the PC industry into what it is today, why would I hate them for that?
I can't see how it's even "quietly". Red Hat has had this info on their website for a while now (can't recall exactly when I saw it and submitted it to slashdot, but it was before last December). As for "microsoftish"? Well, you get what you pay for. Most of the apps I personally run are patchable from sources outside RH. At work, we tend to get patches from the "vendor": ssh from openssh.org, apache from httpd.apache.org, PHP from php.net, etc. in addition to ones from redhat.com/errata/. Likely, we'll shift that balance even more.
I guess Red Hat is being microsoftish by trying to make a profit (maybe someday), ... or maybe it's the windowsupdate.com like ability to patch over the web.
They already do make a profit. Not a large one, but they are profitable. Is this move intended to generate more revenue? You bet. I can imagine them saying "Well, if you want/need guaranteed errata, then buy Advanced Server. If all you need is Linux, download an ISO and then after a year patch yourself for free." That's fine.
This also certainly ties into their Red Hat Update service, which already does network patching, same as Windows Update. (Forgive me if you were making that point; I missed the meaning of "from the web", and am construing "web" to mean "network".)
I think they're more Microsoftish than you may think, and I say 'right on!'.
As long as I have source, and they don't force me to deal with choices they've made, I'm with you. As soon as Red Hat starts trying to remove my liberties by trying to think for me, like MS has made a mint doing, I'm switching. But dump them for trying to make money selling services to those who need/want them? What could be wrong with that? I'd rather download free ISO from a company that only supports it for one year than have to pay up PBS style.
-B
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.
End-of-life? What's that? I mean, c'mon I've still got some apps that run on DOS 3.3 for christ's sake! And that's no joke either (unfortunately).
Geek used to be a four letter word. Now it's a six-figure one.
It doesn't actually need any 'justification'. It's perfectly legal. *shrug*
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
you never denied hating MS... and i still know that you do. You hate them because you think the way they shaped it is evil. You would not be arguing with me right now if you liked MS over linux.
You can't? Just guessing here, but I bet you use linux in your dormroom or your bedroom.
In April, a co-worker and I upgraded roughly 15-20 machines from RH 6.1 to RH 7.2. We don't have IT staff as such, we are both scientists in academia who happen to know a fair bit about system admin. We work in an academic environment.
Our 15-20 machines are all slightly different. They all needed to have certain config files backed up and restored. They each have a different person with different skills and different requirements sitting in front of them. So, how did it go?
The first machine probably took 2 hours of fairly close attention to install. Everything had to be documented so we could reproduce it. Then, I used that machine for a few weeks, noting what else needed to be tweaked and installed. Then, one by one, we installed the OS on the other machines. This process took about 2-3 weeks and took say 30-60 minutes of real work per machine including the updates. Then the users got a hold of them. One person notices that program X doesn't exist anymore. Another notices Y doesn't exist. Someone else notices that xvscan doesn't work, so we have to figure out how to use xsane. This continues for a month or more, each time requiring one of us to install more software on the systems and test it out. The first machine (mine) is determined to be completely out of sync due to different choices in the installer, so it is done from scratch.
I highly doubt this is a "rare case." These are just desktop machines, not even mission critical servers (although one was a web/db server).
I sure don't look forward to repeating this excercise in January 2004. If Red Hat's options are a 12-month upgrade cycle or $800/machine, we'll find some other company. But, their promised corporate desktop may be the answer for us if its priced reasonably.
Hi, Debian.
again, I'm arguing with you because I find you offensive. I don't even use Linux much, lol... I primarily use Solaris at work and use Windows on my desktops/workstations, because it's easier to make it more like Unix than to replace my Windows software with X equivalents. although I have to admit I've recently been using my powerbook more and more, when I can.
I kinda see your point, but this isn't really the same thing. There will always be perfect, consumer level, support for products like Linux. It's grown without the help of companies, and will continue to grow- with or without them.
I am by no means a fan of RedHat (Slack for me), but I think that they have a legit and smart model here. You're essentially buying support when you buy their (reasonably priced) distribution. If you don't like it, then don't pay them. The ISOs will still be there tomorrow. And even then, the source code is there for the consumers to improve upon.
It isn't quite the same thing as Microsoft's forcing users to upgrade closed-source products with no new features (Office comes to mind), but even MS has to make a buck. Weather or not I agree with the means by which they do so is another story.
Overall, I don't feel that it is fair of The Register to present things this way. They've lost a lot of respect from me.
If you haven't upgraded your Linux systems in 6-12 months, I'd love for you to send me your IP address(es), because I'd like to send you a few packets pertaining to;
* Double-Free Bug in CVS Server
* ISC DHCPD Buffer Overflow
* Multiple Vulnerabilities in ISC BIND
* Apache/mod_ssl Worm...
You've listed vulnerabilities in applications, not in the OS. No one's denying that buggy applications can (and should) be upgraded straight away. What's being discussed here is why the OS should have such a short lifespan. IMO, even if the kernel needed a bugfix, RH could supply a service pack, just like MS does.
lazy, incompetent, certifications-are-king sysadmins out there who give us a bad name. They're the ones who adopt the theory that applying updates is "too hard",
Yes, there are testbed systems in large companies, but testing a new OS (and more importantly testing your applications work well on the new OS) is hard work and this costs the company time and money that could be applied elsewhere. The OS vendor should make upgrades as convenient as possible, especially for the person paying them support $$$. A 1-year upgrade cycle is way too short. Yes, eventually enough applications will depend on the functionality provided by a new kernel/OS to make sense for the vendor to end-of-life the old kernel/OS -- but this should be in terms of years and not months.
As the article notes:
And do we detect just the glimmer of an Advanced Server sales push here?
-- RH is trying to push sales on RH Advances server, which is the product where most of its profit comes from!
gOOk?
"Guarantee" is a pretty strong word, especially in a day in age where web-based software solutions are becomming very prevalent in the industry. Everything from trouble ticket systems to company Intranets to developer networks and more are hosted on web servers.
Moreover, all the vulnerabilities I referenced were not web server related. libbind affects any and all DNS resolution, for example. zlib is used in a lot of system applications, and we all know that CVS is often used for distributed software development projects.
For someone making accusations of assumptions, you're assuming a lot yourself.
BTW - I'd like to see you somehow support the notion that corporate web servers are such unimportant space-wasters, especially considering the mass hysteria of corporate tales of woe after the likes of Code Red / Nimda pummelled them. How many billions of dollars was it purported to have cost the U.S. economy again?
In the future, you may wish to substitute unquantifiable terms with less specific generalizations like "a lot of", and shy away from making far-fetched guarantees you can't possibly hope to support. And please, don't quote me figures from your last three employers, or from companies your friends work at. I'd like some real hard-line data on why corporate web servers are worthless. You can stick to the United States if it'll make your task easier.
Now there's a claim that's nice and easy to support. I can also guarantee that there are a lot of nice cars not on the road. So? We're talking maybe one in ten thousand server systems out there that fit this bill. Systems most likely owned by corporations who a) will already be paying for higher level technical support, and b) can afford an additional layer of support above and beyond that.
I highly doubt any mission-critical, non-networked machines of such import will pay any mind to a consumer-level product support document.
BD Phone Home!
Shameless plug. Like you weren't expecting it.
again, I'm arguing with you because I find you offensive
it's flamebait cause you're a flaming homosexual.
...?
-Barrett
We've all heard the story about the NetWare server that got walled in and ran for x number of years without rebooting because everyone forgot about it. Who SAYS you have to upgrade? So if you want an OS to be supported, you have to upgrade it? I think RH is being a little hasty, I mean Redhat 8.0 is recent and they already have it slated to decomission at the end of the year. I guess you can't have Windows 2000's much toted 5 nines of uptime if you have to upgrade your OS.
yes, your utter gayness offends me. troll somewhere else for a date. rumour has it that both RMS and ESR like young guys that are good with math and not too intelligent.
I noticed that too. I was going to mention it in my post, but I decided not to.
...yep folks "we can't expect them to support their products forever"..., now can we? After all... a year is forever, isn't it? Oh yeah, they really care about the desktop user.......
*SiGh* Debian never felt so gooooood!!!!!!!!
Long live Debian, GNU, the FSM and RMS!
Pay suckers!!!!!!!!! but don't forget to donate to the ones who made this all possible.
despicable racist troll
I prefer to call them inbred red-necks.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
What the hell are you talking about!
It's no problem to upgrade APPS.
It's a HUGE PAIN to upgrade the entire OS. It costs money just to REBOOT!
We have 10 7.x systems, and 10+ that aren't onsite. We upgrade all the apps you mentioned regularly, the day Red Hat issues errata (using up2date). It's going to be *very* difficult to upgrade all those babies before the end of the year. I see *NO* reason why I have to upgrade a working 7.2 system. Before this, I only upgraded the OS when buying new hardware, and even then I have the new and old alongside each other until the changeover can happen.
This stinks big time, especially for small shops who thought $2500/yr was all we'd have to pay to stay current until 9.x comes out.
RedHat is anything but reliable. This last time I used it was version 7.1. Guess what? it locked up hard. All the time. RedHat has a real quality control problem. I never have these issues with Slackware!
For your sake, I hope none of your hardware dies on you. With no apparent DRP you'd be dead in the water.
Now you'll have to pardon me while I don't feel sorry for you. ;)
BD Phone Home!
Shameless plug. Like you weren't expecting it.
It's more than that, though. Microsoft forces "upgrades" by creating software that requires the new operating system. I don't see Redhat doing this. When new software is released that requires new libs, those can be installed separately without needing "support" from Redhat.
Isn't that one of the many reasons we see so many servers getting compromised by the latest worm or virus that's going around destroying half the Internet? ;)
Touché
-Ben
I spoke with a RedHat marketing guy about the EOL calendar at LinuxWorld. Basically there will be two types of their distribution. The first will be a version with a one year EOL. This would be the version that you can DL an iso from ftp.redhat.com. The second type is the "professional" version of RedHat Server and RedHat Workstation. These versions will have longer EOL schedules and are designed for large organizations. You have to pay to get the professional version.
"No Comm, No Bomb"
I've worked for a lot of commericial software companies and many didn't even announced EOL for products or they did it so quietly most users never knew. I'm not so sure putting extact time period on the EOL is good. What worked fine at other places is we support the current and one previous version of the product. So timeframe didn't matter when new version came out support version shifted up a notch. It takes a lot of resouces especially time that could be focued on fixes on newer versions. I think RH is doing the right thing.
> this one is not flame bate.
Wow, for a supposed intellectual, you sure are a LOUSY FUCKING SPELLER.
I also worked for a major company that made a very public migration from DEC Alpha systems using Tru64 to Linux. All they ever said was "look at all the money we are saving" by not having to pay those high fees for Tru64, and by being able to run the WinTel hardware platform. When I asked about support, the answer was... "no problem, its Open Source, so WE can fix any problems we run into." Famous last words. I don't remember a single bug ever getting fixed in that manner. Yet, we certainly ran into problems.
Here's MY favorite... all of the developer hardware was sized to allow all of the software build process to fit in RAM and thus avoid paging. The hardware was purchased from a major PC vendor, who sold a very solid platform at a great price. Of course, the way they did that was to sell systems with a limited upgrade path. So, when the link step of the build outgrew the original sizing, suddenly there was a major crisis. All builds were taking exponentially more time as systems started paging like crazy. And, there was no (affordable) way to throw hardware at the problem since, even though RAM was incredibly inexpensive, the systems had no headroom and thus coule not take on the additional RAM needed. Instead we all sat and waited for the builds reading up on the disputes within the Linux community regarding the algorithm used for choosing pages to page out (and understanding why we had SUCH a big problem on Linux, having had no problems with high page rates on Tru64).
Anyway, sounds to me like these RedHat EOLs fit the same pattern. If you want long, extended lifetimes for an OS, you need to pay for it. If you don't pay, then the vendor just is not going to be able to afford to provide the level of support and longevity required of for business' production systems. It will be interesting to see how all of these businesses migrating to the "free" platform deal with the fact that it really is not free at all.
There are definitely times when Linux is the cost effective and appropriate choice, even for production environments. But, it does cost money to provide support. Thus, if you need and expect long lifetimes, one should also expect to pay so the vendor can afford to provide the product to meet those expectations/needs.
Die nigger!
Hey, at least you're straightforward.
This topic is *SO* last year. To wit:
From: Mark J Cox
To: redhat-watch-list@redhat.com
Subject: Errata policy updates and product end of life
Date: Thu, 19 Dec 2002 15:28:59 +0000 (GMT)
Cc: redhat-announce-list@redhat.com
This email outlines our new policy for errata support for Red Hat Linux
products and gives the end-of-life dates for currently supported products.
Ok, I can see EOLing 6.2, that one is a bit long in the tooth. But 7.3? Lets think this through a bit. Peeps who have been using RedHat for any length of time know that .0 and .1 releases are for one's own machine to get a feel for what is coming in the next .2 release to be unleased into the production environment after it stabilizes a month or so. So here we get this new EOL schedule and RH7.3 stops getting updates via up2date on Dec 31. Meanwhile, 8.2 will have shipped somewhere around October. Give it a month to stabilize, do a few test installs, etc and you are in late Nov or early Dec. and have about a month to complete the rollout, during the month with the most problems keeping all hands available. Uh huh.
And THIS is supposed to make me want to buy RHAS? After they spent the last two years pitching RHN to everyone, they canibalize those sales to drive RHAS? And they give you a whole three years on that product. Wow!
To be honest, I hadn't yet even drank the RHN kool-aid deeply, only buying a single sub for my laptop just to try it out. Yes it works nice but it wasn't that much better than grabbing the rpms and installing them myself. Certainly didn't see why I'd want to buy it for individual desktops when I already have effective ways to update them in mass.
I really pity the fool who bet his ass on it only to see it yanked away unless one is willing to either pay $800/year/cpu or climb on the upgrade treadmill. Upgrades should only happen when you actually NEED the improved functionality, otherwise they are just a productivity drain.
I suspect that if KRUD promises better than one year update lifetimes they could make a killing since their subscriptions are a heck of a lot less expensive (not being sold per CPU) than RHN, even if it isn't a pretty web interface. I know I'm now looking for options. Our desktop hardware really isn't ready for RH 8.x's bulk and with 7.x dead in less than a year....
Democrat delenda est
What miffs me (a little) is that they haven't made an installation guide available to non-paying customers since 7.2.
If you pay $800 for the big version then you have longer support as well as more application provider support from vendors like Oracle. They do not like moving targets and pressed redhat for this. They are also more stable and more mature. I think redhat 8 for example is a nightmare for a server. No apache 1.3x and perl 5.6x support as well as mod-perl and mod-php means its pretty useless out of the box as a web server platform. But the enterpise edition is built around a more mature 7 which supports these things.
Well you get what you pay for. Their is no need to go crazy. Microsoft can continue to support their desktops because their customers buy in such bulk that they can recover the support costs. The same does not apply to redhat. Otherwise I would recommend Bsdi or Sco if you want a long term commitment on a unix for the intel platform. I also heard Sun has been doing quite well with its low end Intel Linux server line so this might also be an option.
http://saveie6.com/
Microsoft has to extend their product support because at 3 years they have usually fixed enough bugs that companies can start to use the software. If they promised not to fix any more bugs, no one would ever install their software.
But DNS servers and print spoolers that have already been running for several years do not need support from RH. In the rare case that an upgrade is needed (for a good business reason such as new abilities or a security fix,) most linux administrators can easily handle it.
This announcement means two things to me:
1. RH will no longer maintain the lists of fixes/upgrades for me unless I download/buy a recent version.
2. RH will no longer produce and test binary installs for me. (Most of the software we use is available as RPMs from the developers anyway.)
Oh well. I may have to stay current by checking ten websites instead of one.
I spend my life entertaining my brain.
If you're trying to purchase a few dozen (much less a hundred or a thousand) desktop machines for corporate rollout, it's going to take you a few months to get the budget approved. Then you spend a month or two on the RFQ and RFPs, another month or so going through them, and another month or so finalizing the decision. Add on the order time, receiving time, and software installation/configuration time, and you're hitting 9-12 months before they're even hitting a user's desktop.
So you've got a good chance that by the time your users first turn on a RedHat desktop, the support has been dropped.
Congratulations, RedHat, you just knocked yourself out of competition for the corporate desktop. With Mandrake dead, that leaves SuSE as the only real contender for a corporate solution on the desktop.
On the server side, consider that it typically takes at least a year for third-party vendors to certify a distro as "supported" for their products. Sometimes it even matters -- Sybase 12.5 would only run on a certain patch level of RedHat 7.1 last time I tried it (Mandrake 8.1, 8.2, and SuSE 8.0 could not even prepare the storage space for the database without crashing, much less run a server.)
I know that most corps are going to have special contracts set up for support, but that doesn't help those of us on the development or consulting side of things who don't have the budget to pay for full AS licenses just to get a system that doesn't need to be rebuilt annually.
If I want to rebuild systems annually, I'll go back to Microsoft-based development -- there's more work supporting that junk anyhow.
I do buy full distros to support the vendors -- and end up spending far more on Linux distros per year than I ever did on Microsoft products as a result. I have RH 5.2, 6.2, 7.0, 7.1, Mandrake 7.2, 8.0, 8.1, SuSE 8.0 and 8.1 -- all full box sets at $75-100 each. Even when I don't install them, I buy kits just to help keep the companies I believe in afloat.
I sure don't appreciate RH trying to rip me off as payback. Even with RH normal pricing, who in their right mind is going to pay $150 for a full current release of RH, for which you only get a few months update support, vs. buying a generic copy of the disks for $20 plus shipping and paying less than $150 for a full year of RH update support? Such nonsense would be why RH 7.1 was the last distro of theirs I bought or installed -- I don't believe in their model anymore.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
I think Red Hat stands to make more supporting 6.2 than on all new cardboard boxes. I don't know of any serious system using redhat that goes past that, and their "Advanced Server" is still 6.2 based, and most 3rd party vendors still target it.
Ben alors vieux cas social, on sait plus quoi raconter d'interessant ? Quand on sait pas, on parle pas.
One of my machines runs on RedHat 7.2. I update it on a regular basis using RHN. The machine has been running continously since it was setup (uptime of 325 days), and since it serves my DNS and DHCP (among other things), pulling it down for upgrades isn't much of an option.
Does this mean that I'm forced to upgrade the entire machine every so often in order to keep using RHN? If I have the latest versions of the installed packages, why does it matter if I run on 7.2, 8.x, or even 9.x?
Basically, what I'm asking is what benefit is there for me to completely shutdown the machine, upgrade the OS, and rebuild the software that isn't rpm'ed if necessary, rather than just updating the individual packages?
I use Macs to up my productivity, so up yours Microsoft!
Except in some very rare cases, I can't see a reason to install a linux distro that's over a year old. I can come up with at least one very valuable reas on to run a distro that's over a year old.
IT WORKS.
Like the old saying goes: If it ain't broke, don't fix it (much less replace it). The last thing I want is to have to test and install my software on another OS, just because someone refuses to provide security updates for the current version.
OS Software is like love: The best way to make it grow is to give it away.
Redhat Advanced Server is supposed to have a much slower release cycle so that Veritas, Oracle and the like don't have to try to keep up with a moving target.
I haven't researched it just yet since we haven't deployed Linux at my current employer (we're deploying a farm either this year or next), but I would assume that the support cycles for the Advanced Server product will be longer also.
Definitely worth looking into before touting Raleigh as the new Redmond.
You hobbyists just don't get it.
I had an email from redhat _LAST_YEAR_ with these details. Why is this news now? Was it even news then?
One year is too short. Period. Three years is good, and five years would be better.
The product in question is support. Cutting support off early is dumb. If they really want to discontinue older systems, maybe they should just increase the cost as newer releases become available. 8.x is 1x, 7.x is 2x, 6.x is 3x, and so on.
I couldn't believe my eyes when I read the announcement on Dec. 19th when it come though on the redhat-announce mailing list. I had often wondered why RedHat was still supporting 6.2 but I would have never imagined they would ever go to only a 1-year life-span. That is just way too short. I have been using RedHat for my client's servers but now I am looking for another distro to switch to that has some kind of reasonably easy update procedure for patches and such. I'm currently planning on not installing any new servers using RedHat Linux after June 30th of this year due to this policy change. I do not fell it is right to change my clients full price for a new server install when I change them over to whatever distro I finally decide to switch too so I will likely loose some potential income over this. Speaking of which, does anyone have any good suggestions of distros to use for servers? I'm currently looking mostly at just going to Debian and I am also looking into Slackware. I have used Mandrake in the past for servers and did not find it satisfactory for a server (its perfectly fine for a desktop though). Does anyone have any suggestions that I've overlooked? As far as a desktop distro goes, I'm still trying to decide if a 1-year EOL is reasonable or not. It would be nice if RedHat changed the EOL of 7.3, 8.0 and future releases to be closer to 5 years, or even the 3 years that they are planning on doing with their Advanced Server line. The one thing that gives some hope that the 1-year EOL is not in stone is this line from the announcement: "Therefore, starting with Red Hat Linux 8.0, we have updated the errata support policy and will now provide errata support for all releases of the base OS for at least 12 months from the date of the initial release." (emphasis mine)
I've also been wondering why this has taken this long to make it onto Slashdot. I was expecting to see it on the front page the day it was sent to the redhat-announce mailing list or at least within a week, not over a month later.
ok i just tried this, touch Aaa, touch aaa, touch BBB.
-------
ls -l
aaa
Aaa
BBB
-------
which is nothing like any of yours.
you'll never see an untrusted external source hitting my cvs tree.
At first, I didn't think this was so bad (atm, I'm just a home user, afterall). But thinking a little further, I don't like it at all. I moved from Debian to Redhat recently, which I know sounds crazy, but basically I wanted the "more professional" feel and I wanted to do software raid on my root drive, which is nontrivial in Debian.
So far its worked out well, though I miss the huge apt-repository sometimes. But if I have to do a cd-based upgrade every 6 months, well, to hell with that! Heck, $20 says Debian woody is still getting security updates this time next year. I'm not sure they've even stopped patching potato yet. Seriously, how can Redhat make money when their non-free support expires more quickly than Debian's free support? I don't know how long other distros go on support generally, but Redhat can't afford to give up their edge in this area.
from my reading, the audits are for
checking compliance with service restrictions,
for eg., not using a subscription for more than
one "installed" system, you have buy one for
each.
however, it is not clear to me whether you are
free to install AW on other machines without
a subscription. the EULA seems to allow this.
can someone clear this up?
Ummmmm lets see once they come out with a release it takes them about 6 months to make it stable. (or in the case of 7.0 never.) Then it takes me 2 or three weeks to undo all the help they gave me, so that it's usable. So I'm left with a little over 5 months of lifecycle. I mean it's not like they support the product or anything. When in the past I worked in an environ that did pay for RH support we dropped it. Why. We were constantly told.
1. Upgrade/change your hardware.(Uh guys you list this hardware as supported and it did work in the last release!)
2. RTFM (To which the answer is WFM (what fine manual)) However most current man pages I really need are current for RH 6.2
3. They don't plan to support that feature. (You mean the one where when I click on an icon the appliction doesn't immediately crash?)
4. The problem is with the application developer and I should contact him/her. (Should I also send this person the check I would have sent to you?)
5. Download the beta rpm
6. We don't support the beta rpm yet. (%$&#)
7. Check the archives.
8. It's a known problem wait till the next release. (Ummm how to I tell corporate that they have to wait to get this fixed?)
If I want real support.... I go to the community. There I get answers and often, in multiple flavors. More problems are fixed in the community than you can imagine. Paying RH by purchasing mulitple copies of the OS I do and will continue to do. But support. No thanks. I just don't feel I got my moneys worth. HOWEVER if they want contributions to handle the maintenance of the mailgroup servers I'd be happy to contribute to that.
I'm sorry, I'm to tired to be witty at the moment so this message will have to do.
You pay for the support, the software is free! So when you pay for support per year, then just pay for it again next year, but with a newer product...
Duh.
If it's true that companies want support for their installations so they don't have to upgrade, then I'm betting that it's worthwhile enough that someone could start a little company providing support to old RH installs.
Think about it; you don't have to do NEW development as you might if you were doing a full distro - RedHat is paying for that. The bugs are going to be identified and repaired by others - you just have to patch up the software and send it out. Wouldn't need to be that big of a company, either, I'll bet - half a dozen techies and a few biz types would probably do it.
RedHat != Linux contrary to what the media seems to be pushing. Don't like the new RedHat policy? Switch distribitions.
Everybody always harps about Linux being about choices and multiple distributions. So use something else instead of RedHat.
To state it in stark and simple terms, Red Hat managed to convince a bunch of malign schizophrenics to help it feed us a diet of robbery, murder, violence, and all other manner of trials and tribulations. What was the quid pro quo there? The complete answer to that question is a long, sad story. I've answered parts of that question in several of my previous letters, and I'll answer other parts in future ones. For now, I'll just say that the problem with it is not that it's prudish. It's that it wants to lead us, lemminglike, over the precipice of self-destruction. We can't stop Red Hat overnight. It takes time, patience and experience to indicate in a rough and approximate way the two unconscionable tendencies that I believe are the main driving force of modern favoritism. The end.
--
kvetch, kvetch, kvetch
...and where to scratch...
Look, when I heard about the new EOL policy, I had no problems with it. If you want longer than a 12 mos cycle, run Advanced Server. I even recommended that my company switch infrastructure Linux systems to RHAS.
But $800/system/year? For _basic_ install support? For software only? WTF...that's ridiculous.
Also, there's no clause for development versus production systems. I have a website I manage...backend uses OpenLDAP on Red Hat boxen. So there's three boxes in the production, two more in our QA site, and one in development. At a minimum, that's five boxes. 5 X $800 = $4000/yr. Management would freak on that. It would honestly be cheaper for us to use Windows server and run on that, or probably even old Sun boxes.
My company is also a Linux ISV...but Red Hat had zero deals for us...we'd be better off certifying on SuSe or Debian.
Hey, fuckwad, what's with the racist troll? (The highlighted letters in the parent post spell out as "gook"). Moderators, please mark the parent's down into the 7th circle of hell where it belongs.
There is NO ROOM for such hateful remarks here, fuckwad!
Redhat employs staff, which includes programmers.
...
Profit is what is left over after all liabilities and costs have been covered (if they have been covered). Profit != Revenue. Don't fault someone for being evil just for attempting to cover their costs. I would further say that there is nothing evil about attempting to provide a reasonable rate of return to investors.
If you take 10,000 USD and buy a certificate of deposit with a 4% annual rate of interest, and inflation is 3%, you have a gross 1% rate of return. You are guaranteed that return with zero risk. You could roughly equate this to a 1% profit.
Is that "evil capitalism" to expect a return on your investment?
Stockholders (those who somehow acquired shares of stock, usually by purchase with funds) expect some sort of return on their investment. Shares of common stock can have tremendously high rates of risk, as the owners are not promised any compensation should the company declare bankruptcy and go belly up to be dissected for assets to pay secured creditors and preferred shareholders.
Clearly, RedHat should not expect people to want to fund their existence purely for altruistic reasons indefinitely. How many more x.0 releases will it take to piss off the rest of its following? (I switched to SuSE after the 7.0 release).
I would still consider using RH AS 2.1 for running a production Oracle Database Server (with subcribed support) but only because Oracle tossed SuSE aside in terms of marketing agreements. As RH Advanced Server offers a 3 year lifecycle (when was 2.1 released?) it seems to be more attractive.
But when Oracle releases a new database version almost yearly (we're just moving to 9i R2 in June) with 10i being released in May - the idea of getting a certified product matrix of database software, operating system and 3rd party backup software seems pretty difficult. Throw in a 3rd party filesystem and one could have 4 different vendors to deal with when debugging problems.
Looking at things that way, Oracle/W2K Server doesn't sound so bad
You're a fool. You've been bamboozled into believing that everything has to be a commercial solution or it's worthless, dead, or unsuccessful. I've said it before, and I'll say it again: (sing along, kids!)
/. are not buying music and movies. thats why we would rather run anything at all but MS operating systems. And that is why we would rather code opensource than closed. The playing field is a place of crossfire and even friendly fire, so no matter what position you take, somebody will believe (not just think, believe) you to be wrong. Trust me.
Communism sucks for governments, but it works great for groups of people with a common goal!
That's right, kids...opensource is good for you. It lets you give your time to the group, or COMMUNE, and give back the results of your productivity to the masses for equal division! and the great thing about software is, that unlike the finite products that software corporations wish it to be, can be copied effortlessly countless times, with little distribution cost to anyone!
So let's all try a nice big glass of Communism today, and stop worrying about whether Capitalism is going to benefit from our pinko operating system!
but seriously, this whole copyright and software thing is just like the cold war all over again, except this time everyone who has actually researched their stuff realizes that there's far more atrocities on the pro-IP side than the commie rat bastards they want you all to think us OSS people are. I could say generic "when you support..." joke, but its no joke. thats why so many of us here on
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
Yeah, I've bought a lot of boxed sets of Red Hat. Actually, what you were buying changed over time. When I started, it came with some nice extras that made it worth it, 3rd party X server with an ability do a multiheaded display which XFree86 has only recently matched for instance, BRU backup software, and so on. While the price of the succeeding boxed sets rose, the amount of added value Red Hat contributed dropped. The licensed programs disappeared and were replaced with trial versions disabled after an evaluation period. The manuals shrank and lost detail. The number of CDROMS grew, but probably not as fast as the cost of producing them has dropped.
Still, there is that support, and indeed eventually that's all buying the sets really got you. Or at least, you thought it did. With that support, what you paid for was the implied assurance that gotten past that 8.0 install, you could reasonably expect little trouble from your Red Hat systems, for the next few years, provided you were concientious with updates.
Well, at least that's what you *thought* you paid for. Now, just to keep your systems minimally safe and under your own control (assiming internet connections), you are going to have to pay for it again and again, every year.
If I'm paying for support, I expect to have support for the currently installed version for at LEAST 5 years. Why pay for support if you don't get what you need? I don't want to update 10,000 desktops every year. RedHat will have to come up with some sort of long term support option, at a fair price, if they want to land BIG contracts.
Anarchists never rule
Large clients (e.g. banks) have the clout to ensure that once they select a hardware platform with a large provider like IBM, Dell, or Compaq, they will continue to get identical hardware on subsequent orders, even after the regular consumer can no longer order the components.
The same applies to the software they run. End of life to a large corporation only means that the general public can't get support for the product and is forced to upgrade; corps keep getting support for as long as they are paying enough.
Most corps I've worked for are running software that no one would even think of buying or installing anywhere else. It's all about maintaining compatability, and lock-stepped upgrades of entire farms of corporate systems. Even applying a software patch for the OS requires regression testing of third-party and internally-developed software that the OS vendor often does not have access to.
The last large client I worked for takes about three months to determine if an OS patch can be rolled out. Until then, you live with the problems caused by the OS bug, even if that means getting paged every morning to restart servers, or that users are going to have to put up with periodic dead sessions.
Absolutely nothing is more important to a large corp than data integrity. Not the sanity of the support staff, the profit margins of the vendors, or the "improvements" of a newer OS release. Nothing is allowed to change that might risk the data, and making changes without proper verification and authorization is a firing offense -- no matter whether they eventualy apply the update you forced or not.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Once you've upgraded all the packages to their current level, all that's left are the few packages (Base layout, package management interface, etc.) that comprise the "OS". If you require support but RedHat declines it on this basis, simply apply the updates and call them back.
From conversations I've had with our sysadmins, I understand RH won't take that call. i.e. We're forced to upgrade the entire distro on all our servers, at this frenetic pace RH is dictating, just in order to stay supported.
You make good points about upfront investments & testbed servers - we do that. However, testing is quite a complex issue for us (we have to compile-in and test large file support on our DB servers, for eg) -- so ensuring a seamless transition is still hard work.
After all this, we may switch to RH advanced server -- the pressure is working.
Oracle only supports the terminal version of its products, in terms of providing fixes.
this meant that in the 7.x series, the last one supported was 7.3.4 - as 7.3.4.5.1, I believe.
in the 8.0.x series, you had to upgrade to 8.0.6.x to stay on a version for which patches (like tns listener vulnerabilities) were back-ported.
8.1.6 was desupported rather quickly - so one had to upgrade to 8.1.7 and patch to 8.1.7.4.x in order to get a recent patch for yet another tns listener vulnerability.
9.0.x is already staring at de-support, with support for 9.2 to close at the end of 2005 - and I haven't even started using that version in production yet.
Matching oracle versions with OS versions is not going to be much fun, particularly when releases are certified against a kernel version - or at least used to be.
But it is a version of job security.
Well.. the trouble is that OS tends to believe in release early, release often.
Now say that RH maintained an particular release. Over time they fix reported bugs, they update software when there are security problems, they update software for extra features and functionality, and so on..
Well isn't that just an upgrade?
However, a year is too short a time I agree. But 10 years for a server? That would require them to take every bug fix and back port it to probably 20-30 distro version. It would become totally unmanagable.
I feel for redhat and see the problem they are in. They have a very very large code base to maintain.
Slow down BL! then I seriously doubt the IQ of any person with moderatorship reading that comment is above 12%.
Stop professing to be of above average intelligence, and keep pushing it, when you don't understand IQ is not a percentage. If a "dumb" person was "twelve percent" intelligent, that would make it very limiting to be a "smart" person. IQ stands for Intelliegence Quotient. Asking someone what dictionary they're using while making a spelling mistake in the same sentence does indeed give us a clue of your intelligence, of that have no doubt.
I've set up several critical server systems to various places using what are now called "consumer-level" Red Hat releases (5.2, 6.2, 7.1, 7.3, none with 8.0 yet), and will probably continue to do so in the future (though not necessarily always when I might have done that before). Here's why:
There's a big difference between a Linux deployment, and a, say Windows 2000 Server or Solaris deployment - Linux is free. Because the software license cost is zero (or at least low in comparison), it often makes sense to deploy two lower-cost machines instead of one bigger, more expensive system, and gain some redundancy in the process.
Now, once you have that redudancy, you can use it to your benefit even while upgrading. Worried that a major Red Hat upgrade, that you have to do because of upcoming EOL, is going to cause problems? No worries. Take one machine offline, test the upgrade there, and continue when you've cleared any problems.
Fact is, it's almost as easy to severely disrupt a business function with a Microsoft service pack installation as it is with a Red Hat major release upgrade. It always boils down to whether you can afford an online backup system or not.
Ask a silly person, get a silly answer.
I buy my RedHat distros, pad're. Bought v-6.0 & v-8.0 ... AFAIcare RedHat can stop providing free downloads and just support my purchased software. Screw the 6-finger webtoe weenies.
loller
Come folks this is business. Red Hat is being very smart, especially for a linux OS company.
When the squeeze is on, RED HAT Linux will be one of the few if not THE last linux distro standing.
learn to count.
If you're trying to purchase a few dozen (much less a hundred or a thousand) desktop machines for corporate rollout, it's going to take you a few months to get the budget approved. Then you spend a month or two on the RFQ and RFPs, another month or so going through them, and another month or so finalizing the decision. Add on the order time, receiving time, and software installation/configuration time, and you're hitting 9-12 months before they're even hitting a user's desktop.
I'd say this company has issues with red tape and management infrastructure. In companies who wish to compete in tight markets the budget would already exist for the department delegated to handle tasks such as this. So the 9-12 months you used in this terrible example of what should be handled in only a few weeks (NOTE: There are exceptions but in general this is more accurate). However using your example any average department manager/adminsitrator would have already known from their research (they did do their hoework right?) that the EOL was closing and simply defer until the next release was in it's infancy to get the full life span. Or better yet actually purchase the product being offered which has a longer life span, which is Red Hat's Advanced Server line. I can extrapolate from thier press releases that the Advanced Workstation product will have the same life span as the server line. That life span is three years.
So you've got a good chance that by the time your users first turn on a RedHat desktop, the support has been dropped.
Congratulations, RedHat, you just knocked yourself out of competition for the corporate desktop. With Mandrake dead, that leaves SuSE as the only real contender for a corporate solution on the desktop.
Not if management has a clue! Read the prior paragraph.
On the server side, consider that it typically takes at least a year for third-party vendors to certify a distro as "supported" for their products. Sometimes it even matters -- Sybase 12.5 would only run on a certain patch level of RedHat 7.1 last time I tried it (Mandrake 8.1, 8.2, and SuSE 8.0 could not even prepare the storage space for the database without crashing, much less run a server.)
The key words you used Sometimes it even matters! Well, perhaps. Most of the time it don't! If I were a client of Sybase I would be asking Sybase why they are not keeping up with progress if that is indeed the case with them.
I know that most corps are going to have special contracts set up for support, but that doesn't help those of us on the development or consulting side of things who don't have the budget to pay for full AS licenses just to get a system that doesn't need to be rebuilt annually.
So I assume you are in a commercial business and don't have the resources or "know-how" to stay in business in a tough and competitive market. Surely you don't expect any software company to build their future on your terms? You either adapt and compete or you loose out and fail! Perhaps if your consulting/development business sees a market for supporting Red Hat products which have reached their EOL and chooses to continue supporting them you can create a niche market for yourself!
If I want to rebuild systems annually, I'll go back to Microsoft-based development -- there's more work supporting that junk anyhow.
It's your business. Support junk or support quality, it's all up to you!
I do buy full distros to support the vendors -- and end up spending far more on Linux distros per year than I ever did on Microsoft products as a result. I have RH 5.2, 6.2, 7.0, 7.1, Mandrake 7.2, 8.0, 8.1, SuSE 8.0 and 8.1 -- all full box sets at $75-100 each. Even when I don't install them, I buy kits just to help keep the companies I believe in afloat.
LOL! Let me get this straight. You buy software with no intention of using it only to support the company who sells it? I bet you shop like my wife does. "Well honey we didn't need this 24 pack of Sea Monkey's I bought at Wal Mart, but ole Sam Walton's kids are sure nice and need the money."
Good grief...you have no business running a business. Or else you have more money than sense.
I sure don't appreciate RH trying to rip me off as payback.
Payback...for what? Because you paid for thier product? Red Hat is a business. They are not charity organization who is looking for status or trying to end world hunger. They are simply trying to keep their bottom line in the black. Just like everyone else is. I think you need to come to terms with capitalism.
Even with RH normal pricing, who in their right mind is going to pay $150 for a full current release of RH, for which you only get a few months update support, vs. buying a generic copy of the disks for $20 plus shipping and paying less than $150 for a full year of RH update support? Such nonsense would be why RH 7.1 was the last distro of theirs I bought or installed -- I don't believe in their model anymore.
I believe someone who buys software from any company and brags about buying kits just to help keep the companies they believe in afloat shouldn't be complaining now!
Perhaps the reason you "end up spending far more on Linux distros per year than I ever did on Microsoft products" is because you like spending money "just to help keep the companies I believe in afloat"
I'm sure Uncle Bill will love you for that kind of behavior. I bet they would love to have you buy a few copies of Windows XP Professional and wouldn't care if you installed them or not. However, your bankruptcy attorney will be laughing all the way to the courthouse when your consulting/development business goes belly up.
Your "model" doesn't make sense.
Zoom
Integrity is what you are when nobody is looking.
mod parent up!!!!
You get what you paid for.
If you downloaded RedHat for free or bought it preburned on CDs with some aditional books, than you have what you paid for. (i.e. "ISO images, CSs and books" != "support")
If you need support and you are unable to do it yourself, than buy the support.
You'll get what you'll pay for (if you choose right person/company to make business with).
hany
Why do you need the support for? When have you used it? Do you have special hardware that canot be supported buy the latest 2.0 or 2.2 kernel and there are security flaws in the last redhat provided 2.0 or 2.2 kernel? If your OS is that old chances are your not upgrading all your software just casue the new version is out, cause eventually you'd have to upgrade something like libc which would cause the migration headaches of a distro upgrade.
--- Justin Dearing http://www.justaprogrammer.net/ We're just programmers.
Go Debian like I did 12 months ago. I've never looked back - best OS I've ever used. May not be bleeding edge BUT it is bleeding stable and reliable and easy to maintain and.. ad infinatum
-- These views are my own and do not represent those of my employer in any way.
Cunt!
Why not have RHN support for older than 1 yr releases charged at a higher rate.
In addition this could maybe only cover a subset of core software.
Would give us all a lot more confidence in rhat.
The same applies to any non-free (as in beer) operating system. I've never managed a problem free migration between Solaris versions (through both OS upgrades and hardware upgrades). For that matter Sun will mature Solaris 2.6 eventually, and even IBM will not be able to support a Linux distribution based on a particular kernel for ever (although my experience of Big Blue suggests that they'll claim they will). Red Hat is still trying to build a business based on software that anyone has the source code to, and they have to take decisions to protect that business. Maturing support for a version of their distribution which is getting on for five years old is a method of maintaining their business.
I am a home user/college student (Computer Engineering major) :)
/" (Always wanted to try that) and reinstalled 7.3 I love 7.3, it works like a champ even on my laptop (winmodem and all), and I have it configured great. I see no reason to discontinue support for at least 7.3. I will be sad when it goes. (But maybe, by then...Gentoo!?)
I have been happily running Linux since about 1999 sometime. I have used mostly Red Hat, and have been with it since 6.0. (Athought I have used several other distros) (Also, Cant wait for Gentoo
Anyway, I received Red Hat 8.0 and tried it. I really did not like it. so I did and "rm -rf
Patent: from Latin patere, to be open
*Grin*
You missed his point though.
We've got good DRP in our company, but it *still* costs money just to reboot (if only in sysadmin time.)
As a business user I have no problem with the idea of a yearly maintenance contract on my servers. This is actually a big benefit to know the company that provides my OS will be around when I need them and able to support my platform for it's expected lifetime. We charge our clients in the same way to support their servers.
As a home user, it's no so great. I want to pay for the OS once every few years and upgrade incrementally as required - then do a fresh install every 3-4 years.
It seems to me the small home users will be getting the worse deal from it, but then again, you can always download it for nothing and just buy a new copy whenever you feel flush enough and feel they deserve it enough.
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.
..and tell them I think it's a bad idea.
sup-manager@redhat.com
Maybe you should all do the same.
Get your own free personal location tracker
Hello sailor! That puckering cocoahole of yours looks mighty inviting when you brandish it like that. Do you swallow?
I've been using apt-rpm from Fresh RPMS for a while now, which doesn't have these problems. Apt-rpm provides a free solution, with an open back end (so that you can publish your own packages - for example gstreamer use apt-rpm in this way) and works really well. The alternatives, up2date and red-carpet, have closed back ends, you have to get redhat or ximian to publish your package for you.
Perhap we should go to Red Hat Bugzilla and raise enhancment requests for then to support this?
-- Thorin sits down and starts singing about gold.
Fuck you, nigger!
Yeah I was wondering about that the other day (people other than RH supporting 6.2) and since I've been using FreshRPMS apt to update Redhat boxes for a few months I asked this question on the FreshRPMS list:
For machines that are remote upgrading via a CD is a real problem, I wish debian's installer wasn't so off putting...
Check out MKDoc a mod_perl CMS
> Moderators, do your duty!
Kill a nigger today!
Folks, read your GPL manual again before bashing.
:
:
Short Answer
1) GPL has been devised originally to avoid the troubles brought by EOL and closed source product.
2) RedHat distros are following the GPL rules.
Strictly speaking, because of (1) and (2), we all can conclude that RedHat has the right to decide EOL for their distros (even immediate EOL if RedHat wish it so).
Elaboration
If you need to support an EOLed distro from RedHat, then get your hand dirty, after all you have the source code. You don't know about programming ? That's not RedHat _business_ nor GPL concern.
RedHat already spend time for all of us to get a free OS (should I say it ? Ok, I'll repeat the mantra for the newcomers : free as in free beer, and free as in free speech).
I won't elaborate more : check out the list of user's freedoms devised by the GPL, and verify by yourself that none of these are broken by RedHat decision.
Dear Sir/Madam,
I am writing to you as I read with dismay news of your change to your EOL plans in the IT press.
One of the things that makes RedHat so popular is the free downloads, and speedy patches.
I suggest the following strategy:
Level 1. Downloads free for all or CD <$50 . No support. Perfect for home users, who, let's face it wouldn't pay for ISOs or support anyway, but keep your "mind-share" high. (Mind-share is the only thing that keeps Microsoft going now.).
Level 2. Downloads free, but CD < $200. 1 years free support with a purchased copy. (Additional support can be purchased) Patches and hotfixes available for two major versions. Suitable for the department Samba server, or Apache server.
Level 3. Aimed at corporates. **long** product cycle. I'm talking 3-5 years here. Expensive support contracts. Suitable for the critical databases, or huge desktop rollouts.
You simply have to give companies the knowledge that they'll be supported for years. A company providing a 5000 desktop rollout needs to know that it'll be good for a long time.
I feel that you have missed out Level 2 in your new strategy.
Linux isn't well enough known to take away the "free" aspect that appeals to managers so much.
Give it a few years for people to try it because it is free, and then you can change the pricing.
We have servers here, and should the cost go above a few hundred pounds/dollars, my boss would say "I thought this was supposed to be cheaper." And it's success in little places like this that would make the rest of the business look at larger, more demanding "Level 3" implementations.
Hopefully, you're not just doing this because you are short of money. If you are, well, you have to do what you can to stay solvent. But if it's some "strategy", then I see it not working very well at all.
Yours sincerely
Calum
Get your own free personal location tracker
Yeah, I guess it is lazyness... NOT!
I'm surprised that you get that high moderation being a troll and all, but I'll bite.
I don't know about your boss, but mine would be pissed if I told him I blew the budget to buy 10 extra $10.000 servers (Not including software licences) for a testbench, and then started to use 15 extra hours each week to keep every running server up to date.
I doubt that you know what you're talking about, in an ideal world your case would be true, but in the real world, it is not. So either you are still in Highschool/college, or you work for a company that has unlimited surply of $.
-H
Where did you crazy americans get the idea that competition = communism and monopoly = free market?
Microsoft has more control over the windows software market than the Soviets had over the markets in the former USSR. This is what you call a free market? In the Linux market, we have Red Hat and Mandrake and SuSE in fierce competition, all trying to create the best products, and cutting costs to be able to channel more money towards this goal.And we have Debian and Slackware competing on both price and funtionality. This you call communism?
It is not the chinese who are upside-down, it is the americans.
Love your sig... Condescending little snark, aren't you?
Ok smart buy....
I have a critical system that there is no other choice for. It's an advertising insertion platform that is from the best solution available on the planet.... seachange international... nothing else is a viable choice.. their stuff DOES NOT run on anything higher than NT3.51 and SQL 6.5 so because they will not give me the sourcecode to their product so I can do what they refuse to do I need to threaten them?
Their reasons are solid... NT4.0 and higher are not stable enough, SQL higher than 6.5 offer nothing but instability (because higher than 6.5 get's farther away from the sybase that microsoft blatently copied) These machines are 100% rock solid anf give me reliability better than ANY linux system I have ever seen, they also produce 24 Mpeg2 broadcast quality streams at once on a pentium 166, while trafficking close to a terabyte of data and video files a day.
I will NOT touch it, I will not "upgrade" it for the sake of upgrading... that is stupidity.. but you can easily protect it, I dare any cracker on this planet to try and attack my systems... Oh wait they aren;t connected to the internet... sorry... they only have 2 modem entry points that are simple dial-back modems... 20 year old technology that easily thwarts over 95% of all skilled "crackers"
My company's assessts are safely riding on IT hardware and software that is IMPOSSIBLE to upgrade any further... and it is safe because I dont rely on others to solve my security and stability... I'm skilled enough to find the tools needed to do the job... and THAT is what a skilled sysadmin or IS manager should be.
Looking at things that way, Oracle/W2K Server doesn't sound so bad ...
I've tried, and no matter how I look at the situation, Oracle / Win2K sounds pretty bad. Not " so bad," but actually quite bad.
Oh, sorry. Just over a year. Not much different. My point stands, they are marking something only a few months old dead at the end of this year. I can under stand them dropping 6.2 this year, but not 8.0.
For most of the basic stuff... WHY didnt you set up one Powerful 2 processor machine and 10-15 diskless terminals? I update one machine and the 15 workstations magically get updated. no matter what machine the user logs into ther's their icewm desktop (Gnome and KDE are useless for X terminals, both use way too much memory in the system for what little advantages they give.)
for 90% of all uses this setup is perfect, my NCD terminals cost $10.00 - $30.00 from ebay and what took 2 people to maintain now takes 1 person part-time.. (they maintain 5 offices now... most remotely)
get away from seperate computers unless you really need the seperate computing power or graphics power... if it's regular computer use.... linux terminal server is the ONLY way to go.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Maybe I'm dense here but wouldn't a reasonable compromise be to support the latest dot release for the last three major revisions?
Basically, stop supporting 7.0,7.1,7.2 earlier in favor of keeping support for 6.x, 7.x and 8.x
where x is the last minor version. If you as a user wanted support you would need to upgrade to the latest/last minor version but you wouldn't be forced to upgrade major versions for relatively long period of time. Remember the major versions are defined by significant changes (typically to the C lib's) so there can be reasons someone really wants to hold on to 6.x but the exact 'x' isn't so important.
Because we often use them as a computing cluster and we have lots of disk distributed around too. If we were just a corporate-style group of desktops, your solution would make sense, but for us it wouldn't work.
I believe in RedHat. I own their stock. I buy (yes, actually purchase) their products. But the decision to EOL 7.3 and 8.0 is nonsense. This when 8.1 isn't out of BETA. This IS very MS-like and I have no problem saying so. Yet, this seems to be the norm among some Linux companies: The compulsion to mimmick MS as opposed to standing out. Caldera/SCO/UnitedLinux has been doing similar things with their licensing schemes. When are these companies going to realize that to be an alternative to MS you have to stand out? "A little bit different" frankly isn't enough. >
Here you can find that MS has extended support for NT4.0. So much for keeping up with the Gates! >
To help reduce the number of missing programs next time why not use rpm -qa to get a list of what is currently installed, then install from the list?
Depending on your requirements, perhaps commercial UNIX isn't so bad after all. This isn't intended to be a troll; I'm trying to say that Free GNU/Linux is complementary to the commercial UNIX business model in the real marketplace. Even RedHat is willing to sell you extended support, which furthers this argument (i.e., RedHat is becoming more like the commercial UNIX vendors in time).
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
If they're ditching it so soon, they mustn't like the underlying code.. might explain why linux keeps crashing, on all the systems here.
Aha! so you are using them more for real computing than the waste that is most classes/ business use.
I can understand that need. Many many times I find a school's "linux lab" to be a horrible mis-mash mess of computers that are screwed up, broken, etc... and one CS teacher pulling his hair out trying to maintain them all. and usually they never need any serious power so switching them to a terminal server setup and 3-4 servers for different apps/etc.. works great.
glad to see someone actually using the power of the pc's they have.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I'm supprised this article took so long to come to slashdot, the death dates have been on redhats errata page for many months. As mentioned earlier, this plan makes redhat unsuitible for many buisnesses. Our company cannot afford the TESTING/migration/downtime/TESTING, nor the extradinary price of the RedHat Advan$ed $erver. I STRONGLY feel that redhat should at least support their .2 release untill the next .2 release, their current model will at one point support only 8.0 and 8.1
This new policy has forced (yes, absolutly forced) us to look for alternate distribution. We are currently in the progress of configuring/testing a debian system.
IMHO, they should just early EOL the download edition. That would encourage people to buy the packaged edition.
If they can't do that, then they should at least support the Pro edition for 2 years, it seems fair to me.
But that's their real business. That's what they get paid for.
... this may be a big factor in the decision.)
Yes, it's a PITA. That's why people are willing to pay them to do it. They don't earn their money developing software. I appreciate that they do, and it's great public relations, but they didn't develop their reputation by being on the bleeding edge. They developed their reputation by being moderately conservative with good support (if you paid for it), and moderately advanced (good GUIs are important to sales).
OTOH:
If people are willing to pay to support older distributions, where are the companies that do that? Debian Stable might count, but it isn't exactly a company. (And it only counts if you start your machine as Debian Testing, so that you get support until the dist that you are using moves to older than stable.)
Ximian might count, but they seem to be focused on the latest system also. Still, they have the mechanism in place to support the older systems.
Apt-get for Red-Hat (not a company, again) could be used to support the older systems, but this isn't a way to earn money, so the older versions get purged quite quickly to make way for new ones. (Limited disk space.)
Etc. Can't think of anyone who supports the older versions. (Of course, at the current rate of growth, the older versions are an increasingly small fraction of the market
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Regardless of what you think of some of their shadier practices, in general, "Microsoftish" could be considered synonymous with "Good Business"
In Soviet Russia, hot grits put YOU down THEIR pants.
"Out of pocket" expenses are completely misleading. Just because I use a corporate account to pay for the software or hardware I order does not mean that the money in that account is "free." When I spend corporate funds, there is that much less money available for paying me for the work I've done.
Out of my billables to a client, I have to pay not only my own salary, but the accountant's fees, bookkeeping fees, corporate taxes (federal and provincial), corporate-side personal income tax "contributions" (federal and provincial), corporate contributions on health care, unemployment insurance, etc. In Canada, by the time you're done you'll see about 35-45% of your gross income as an incorporated consultant bled off before you can even think about spending it on your own salary or hardware/software purchases for the corporation.
After all that, I then have to pay personal income taxes and contributions out of my paycheque, the same as anyone sees on their normal payroll cheque. It's just the way business is, and not a complaint per-se, but I do wish people would stop fantasizing that "consultant" means "unlimited budget". (Try getting incorporated and working independantly some time -- the main reason small businesses usually fail is that gap between reality and people's fantasy about how "rich" they'll become running their own business.)
In no way do I expect a product to be supported "forever" without costs, but I do expect some sort of reasonable for-pay option to be available without negotiating a specific support license. Nor do I want "special treatment" from RedHat to get that support -- anyone who is doing software development needs to have product available for a reasonable price in order to keep their skills up to date for servicing clients, not just those of us who bitch about the issue.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
last time I checked, corporations who get paid don't generally care what the users want...Palladium-TCPA anyone?
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
Wow. It's great how you can respond while ignoring the parts of my postings you don't like. First of all, I specifically stated that there was no need to upgrade the servers every week. Second of all, I never said there was a need to mirror every server hardware combination. Thirdly, it's pretty poor IT management if all of your servers are so diametrically different that you would need to mirror each and every one of them for a testbed. Fourth, I'm pretty sure your softare vendor won't try to ram the law down your throat for using their product on a test server. Phone them and ask - they might just be reasonable about it. Remember that we are talking about a Linux distribution here; 95% of the underlying software licenses are probably GPL-based; work with the spirit of open source licensing and test your software.
Oh, I'm perfectly aware that incompetent sysadmins run rampant in the 'real world'. BTW - thanks to all of you for disrupting the Internet over the weekend. The rest of us really appreciate you guys justifying our existance on a regular basis!
BD Phone Home!
Shameless plug. Like you weren't expecting it.
Sure, Redhat has every right to try to turn a buck however they see fit. But they have to reckon with the possibility of losing market share or even profit if they make a wrong turn (or do the same poor thing too long, too).
I think the writing is on the wall. This is a minimal-backlash way of making what used to be the real redhat distribution less attractive, and the AS product more attractive, because most of their profit last quarter came from AS.
It's minimal backlash, because a lot of people don't get that it's not practical for professional support people to upgrade all thei boxes once a year. Sure, I upgrade my home box every time they make a new release, but at work, we do all we can to keep a stable computing base for our clients.
A long time ago, back around redhat 4.2, we converted from debian to redhat. I made that switch whole-heartedly. I became a redhat advocate. But I'm having serious second thoughts about that now. Like I said, I don't blame them for trying to make a profit, but their goals may no longer be compatible with my personal goals or the goals of the team I work in at the university here.
This is a bad decision for the small business market that will make my life more difficult. I've run my e-commerce site on linux for 7 years because linux is reliable and very cost-effective; it helps my business run well for low cost. Still, I pay money to Red Hat because they provide several valuable services to me:
My business does not need rapid upgrades of distros; I want to get the environment working, then leave it running with minimum maintenance as long as possible so I can focus on the other aspects of running my business. In the 7 years of operation I've changed versions 3 times, and 2 involved changing to new hardware. Each one required an install from scratch (for various reasons) and was a pain in the butt.
My business wants a maintenance lifetime of at least 3 years so I'm unlikely to be forced to upgrade just to maintain support. Advanced Server is too expensive for my small business to consider.
I've just gotten comfortable with the Red Hat network, and this decision makes me question my commitment to Red Hat for the future. The first really bad decision I've seen from them.
Maintaining up to date amd/or reliable servers is what sysadmin time is supposed to be for. If re-booting a server or two is required to prevent external access to your data, or your server becoming an amplifier for another DDoS attack, by all means do so.
Sure, there was a day in age where hardware and software could sit for years on end without a reboot (which is why so many old, eg FreeBSD systems still sit with their 2000+ day uptimes), but that day has come and gone. Hardware and software pace of change is accelerated beyond the comprehension of ten years ago, and so have crackers' abilities to infiltrate said software.
We're already well aware that the notion of a "trusted" network is false, based on the number of employees transporting systems between home and work, and the number of client-targetted worms/viruses/trojans, so firewalls will no longer protect us (completely). We can't just lock the door and hope nobody will find our bounty, we have to protect that bounty with the latest software patches.
This is no longer merely about protecting just our jobs, or the small wing of our own corporate sector; it's much more than that. Now our actions can affect multiple-billions of dollars of other peoples' money. It can affect our country's, as well as the world's economy. It can affect our national and foreign militaries, or it could even prevent Grandma from being able to pay her phone bill at her local ATM.
If you combine the number of existing, open vulnerabilities on client and server platforms with the readily available bandwidth to them (20000 clients @ 1.5MBits + 1000 servers @ 45MBits is a lot of "Oomph!"), and the relatively fragile nature of some of our most depended upon services (vis; the root name servers, of which there are only a limited number) and you've got a major recipe for disaster. Entirely too often do people take a lax approach to security because it's "too hard", but in a lot of cases where corporations are concerned, due to poor planning. An IT infrastructure can't be thrown together piecemeal; it has to be planned from the ground up to support;
Even if you only have one 'testbed' server for ten or twenty production servers, you should have the ability to put it online as a hot spare for any one of your servers, take the production server offline, spend as much time as required to get it operational, then switch the production server back into operation. This will likely mean distributing the load among other servers, atleast for a short period of time; so be it. Your servers shouldn't be running at full capacity anyways.
There should also be provisions for minimizing downtime in the event of catastrophic failure. Hardware failure, human error (tripping over power cables happens, unfortunately. :/ ), fire, flood, lightening, etc. Ideally, you'd have a redundant mirror of your servers in an alternate location, but that's for the Really Big Boys, so we'll just consider hot and cold spare servers for the moment, or even the ability to remove one server's load to another server, or group of servers. Having one server exclusively responsible for any single function goes back to poor planning. If your only database server goes AWOL, for example, your entire operation could well cease to function.
With good DRPs being as easy as one additional, lesser powered server, or even a minor software re-configuration (ie; in a load balancer), it's just pure silliness to use it as an excuse for not being up to date as far as security is concerned. That kind of apathy is responsible for the constant ass-kicing we're seeing on the global Internet nowadays, and I find it personally appalling and quite frankly insulting. People are taking up arms against me for having the audacity to desire competency and responsibility from sysadmins.
I've decided to make this my last post on the topic. If the monday-night quarterbacks posting here can't or won't look at, or understand the big picture, so be it.
BD Phone Home!
Shameless plug. Like you weren't expecting it.
From Red Hat's SEC filing:
"There are no licensing fees associated with open source software. Therefore, we do not recognize any separate distinguishable value from the sale of the code itself. We derive revenue from the sale of subscriptions to our enterprise solutions developed using open source technologies."
Enterprise support is paying the bills folks. It's why Red Hat managed to break even last quarter, and it's what might actually make a workable business model. Just how many personal users do you think are paying Red Hat for support of 7.2? Or will pay to keep subscriptions current on 8.0 one year from now?
Red Hat isnt ready for the desktop market yet, and it shows. 8.0 is a step in the right direction, but face it, linux has a long road ahead of it before it achieves any sort of desktop presence. The linux desktop still belongs to the geeks, and do you really think they are paying for technical support?
if you invest six figures for just support, you're getting screwed. You can get multiple admins for that, who know your exact setup intimately.
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
you're an idiot. Your intelligence quotient is a percent. 100 would be average intelligence, or 100%. if your IQ was 12, that would mean you are 12% of normal.
First-- I am convinced that a large percentage of development in the open source arena is for profit, expecially for established projects.
I agree that we should only support companies that provide a value added package or service-- that to do so otherwise is simply throwing money away. I would also argue that the largest efforts made my companies in the open source areas are not by what we think of as open source companies but rather by consulting firms, small custom devemlopment shops, etc. THese are the life-blood of the development of the opensource movement into the mainstream desktop market.
But still-- supporting nonviable companies is not a good idea and goes nowhere.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
I agree with the notion. But I don't see what right I or anyone else has to demand that Red Hat do work on our behalf without fair compensation. Supporting these old versions of software is work. I'm guessing that most of the people running these old systems haven't signed up for support or RHN or whatever fee-based service it is that RH offers-- if they have under the assumption it would include these old versions then they should tell Red Hat they'll cancel if the support for the old versions is dropped (perhaps Red Hat will realize that it was producing revenue after all). But why shouldn't Red Hat try to limit their expenses in this area? They got mouths to feed over there and they're not the only Linux game in town.
In most cases, security updates for the software is available, just not in a convenient RPM and not from RH, but from the actual author of the software. If you have an older system and aren't interested in using newer versions of all this great Linux software that's been coming out the last year, then I can't imagine there are too many packages on your system that would even require security updates.
So perhaps it's more efficient for those folks out running old RH versions to get the source and compile updates themselves. If you are a business with a large installed base, you can easily create your own RPMs and distribute them the same way you'd do a Red Hat RPM update or other internal-use-only software.
I do not have a signature
I bet you use linux in your dormroom or your bedroom.
Nice try. I use it in the living room! (ok, and in the bedroom, and in the basement, and in my daughter's room, and on a laptop when I'm out of town or out of doors). I'm ashamed to admit I make my living working on the MS Windows platform.
OK. So let's assume your case is fairly common. Did you actually buy the 30-day intro support package and a CD-ROM, or did you download your software at no charge from Red Hat's servers? Have you had an ongoing support relationship with Red Hat after that point? (These are honest questions, I can't tell from your post). At some point we need to realize that Red Hat is a business and they got bills to pay, if the cost to provide support for old releases exceeds the benefits (i.e. revenue) then what do you expect them to do? Keep updating old software so you'll never have to upgrade?
$800/machine does sound pretty expensive. I think I'd opt for a new distribution with a longer support cycle (when the RH version you have finally does fall into disrepair) before I paid that if I were in your shoes. However, it's not like security updates are this huge thing. Half the updates they put out are likely to be for software you don't run. It's also possible to get the updated source code for the packages you do run, compile them in your environment (added bonus of being able to tweak the compile in some cases), package them in RPMs, and distribute on your network. Is that less hassle than paying Red Hat? I bet it is. And that's what they're counting on. That the users who need this service will take on that expense themselves, since it appears to be less than economical for them to do it themselves.
I do not have a signature
Patching software like you say has two problems. First at some point (and you don't really know when that will occur) chasing down vulnerabilities, seeing if they apply, and patching code might be more work than just upgrading. But, you don't know which is less work until you've chosen one and done it for a year. Second, I don't have enough faith in my ability to do it right, and the costs of getting hacked are considerable.
Remember, I don't make my living supporting linux either. I support linux so I can do what I do for a living.
BTW, I use Linux in my living room too (Mandrake) and there a one-year upgrade timetable is pretty tolerable (although not for my cable-firewall, which also sits in the living room).
and just to clarify, it's measured compared to your age. so if you're 10 years old and as smart as a 15 year old, your IQ is 150.
You really don't get it. Do you?
Maybe if you RTFA again... really S l o w...
then you might realize that perhaps they don't EVER charge for their software, but rather for the CDs (read: media, not software) and the materials provided, as well as the support for a specified amount of time...
Thank you, you just confirmed that IT tech people know nothing about business issues. You are exactly the person I'd never hire for my IT-staff, because in real life IT, you don't have unlimited budgets, you have to work with what you have.
In the real world, you do have diametrically different servers, so you DO need to mirror them all, to be sure. You sound like a real BOFH, which would never survive in any larger organisation, where political issues presedes technical.
As for talking tech stuff down on your level of understanding, I can tell you that we did upgrade most of the bugs in the applications you mentioned erlier as soon as they came out. But that wasen't the issue here, if you run other things than OSS on your servers, upgrading the OS can have very serious affects to some applications, that you can't get fixed overnight.
I hope I've clearified this for you, but I wouldn't be surprised if you are that kind of person who have to have the last word in any conversation. With your attitude, you'll never get any further than being a system administrator.
-H
With good DRPs being as easy as one additional, lesser powered server, or even a minor software re-configuration (ie; in a load balancer), it's just pure silliness to use it as an excuse for not being up to date as far as security is concerned. That kind of apathy is responsible for the constant ass-kicing we're seeing on the global Internet nowadays, and I find it personally appalling and quite frankly insulting. People are taking up arms against me for having the audacity to desire competency and responsibility from sysadmins.
:) I'm no sysadmin, but I can see you've made good points about admin practices and DRP that a lot of people here (including me) appreciate and find insightful. ( I don't have any mod points handy though :( )
./ sometimes - flames may get too personal.
Hey dude, don't count me as one of these...
The only point I have different is that I think Redhat is pressurising support-paying customers (like my company) to change too much (the entire OS!) too quickly (once a year!) -- and that this pressure, frankly, seems to be driven by a desire to increase sales of their more expensive products.
I am affected since I am an "application admin" in my company (not a sysadmin). Now, I know its not enough for me to test and stress test new versions of the app., (knowing that the underlying OS is stable) -- I now have to co-ordinate and test RH's OS changes. More variables -> more complexity. "Grr!" - I say to Redhat.
I've decided to make this my last post on the topic.
Sad. You have to do that on
Anyway man, as I said - you have made many good points. Have a good night. I hope we part as friends.
Every major service out there, e.g. Apache, Samba, etc. freely makes their source code available. Do you really need Red Hat to go and make a nice package for you to install? Instead, you do what *NIX sysadmins have done for years upon years -- see patch, fetch patch compile patch implement patch, rest easy. And hey, you can download and comile GCC too.
RH should support their products for THREE years only IF the customer is willing to pay for it. Once I.T. gets something installed, they don't wants to go through the hell of a yearly push to install something new over something that works. After three years, I.T. would probably say yes.