Slashdot Mirror
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 :)
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
No one pays? My employer shells out a few grand a year for enterprise RHN...
NT4 will still be supported for another year... that's about as long as Red Hat's supporting 8.0 (give or take a few months).... Windows 95 has been out for... what.... 7-8 years? As another poster pointed out, if this is Microsoftish than Red Hat is moreso than Microsoft itself.
I've never bought support from Red Hat... I just d/l the discs off a mirror and go (and am building my own system in my spare time, though I need a working system in the meantime). Anything Red Hat releases you can get for free and, after all, Linux is still a vastly growing community. For RH to EOL their products in such a (comparatively) short time-frame is expected, given the rapid growth of the core Linux software.
If the distributions were dramatically different between versions on the inside, I could see why someone would be worried about a short RH EOL. But they're at the mercy of the defacto standard version (if you could call it that) of the thousands of core packages that make up the entire distribution. Everyone's trying to jump on the prelinking bandwagon offered with glibc 2.3.1 (which is a killer for a graceful upgrade), but the prelinking feature is about as far from backwards compatible as you can get.
I just can't update all of my linux servers and desktops every year. There's too much going on, like going to 8.0 means moving apache from 1.3 to 2.0 for example (or downgrading once installed). It takes time to test everything before doing big migrations.
Some people here might be able to fine tune their personal linux boxes with ease and see this as no big deal, but get into a corporate IT world where everything must be tested to death before even hotfixes or errata are applied, and then talk about dozens or hundreds of servers, and you'll understand that upgrading that quick isn't just possible.
You think it won't matter? I'm an IT manager with deadlines, stress, labor resource issues, budget shortages, etc, and it concerns me greatly. Won't take much for Microsoft to make a pitch for a stable and predictable environment to people like me to sway us... If you don't think so, you don't understand corporate mentality...
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
It wasn't quiet at all. They sent it out in their newsletter months ago. If you are paying for support now, you definitely got the newletter. If you aren't paying for support (like me) you still could have recieved the newletter if you signed up.
This is another post by the slashdot editors to incite a net riot and therefore churn up more banner views as people furiously flame each other.
At least with Linux, one doesn't need support from the mothership. Open source allows other parties to erect a support system or for self-sufficiency. OSSers can be doing it for themselves.
Closed software (and national copyright terms dictated by a mouse) instead seeks to keep obsolete software copyrights in the hands of corporations for 1.5 human lifetimes. In terms of the lifetime of a computer, that's like 1500 years!
End of life:
Win2000 is March 31, 2008
WinXP Pro is Dec 31, 2009
WinXP Home is Dec, 31 2007
Read more about the Microsoft Desktop Product life cycle Here.
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
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.
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.
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.
I first noticed that change when installing Solaris 2.6 a few years ago. Turned out it was the locale setting that defined the sort behavior; the default locale used to be "C", which corresponded to plain ASCII, and the new default was "en_US", which gives the behavior you describe.
To restore the old behavior, on Solaris and on Linux, you can set the environment variable "LC_COLLATE": export LC_COLLATE=C in your .bashrc (or .bash_profile, or /etc/profile).
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.
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/lifecycle.asp
Apparently the EOL thing hasn't hurt you to much. Thanks for sharing though...