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End Of Support for Windows NT 4.0
IdleMindUI writes "This month is the last month that hotfixes for Windows NT 4.0 will be released. Security fixes will only be released to Microsoft customers with Custom Support Agreements. Custom Support Agreements are still available for customers that need them and can be obtained by contacting a Microsoft rep. More information is available on the NT 4.0 support lifecycle site."
Though many years late, Windows XP is what WinNT4.0 should have been, much less NT3.51.
Fully featured, responsive, and with the new security built into SP2, practically invulnerable to virii or hacker intrusion. (God help you if you want to run with the firewall down, but that goes for anything, don't it?)
The upshot of this is that anyone still down in the dark ages with NT4 ought to seriously think about upgrading to XP. With an upgrade package, it will cost a whole lot less to deploy as all the devices in NT4 are already supported under XP, so there's no need to worry about hardware support like on other operating systems.
Also good news for Microsoft, they can finally pull some of those developers off that project and put them to work getting XP and Longhorn more bulletproof.
That's NT 4 Server. NT 4 Workstation was EOL'd over a year ago.
Windows 2003 was released on Apr 24th, 2003.
A replacment to NT 4 was released, followed by a replacment to THAT, and NT 4 has still been getting support for a year+ after that. I'm a bit suprised that NT was still supported without needing those special contracts up untill now.
For reference, 2K will get "mainstream" support (cost-per-incidient, free hotfixes) untill Jun 30 of this year, and "extended" stupport (hourly cost, pay for hotfixes) untill Jun 30, 2010. Hotfixes are free for everyone untill '07. I can't find End-of-Life dates for Windows 2003.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
It will be interesting to see how many people take the Linux plunge and break from the swirling vortex of regular, forced product updates. I am betting very few, unfortunately. It's just too much of a leap for most people...when Windows XP/20XX offers such a warm fuzzy UI feeling.
I switched from NT to Samba running on Debian over a year ago. I'm not stuck relying on some company to deliver on-time updates. I've never had a virus infection. Oh, and the only time I need to reboot is to update the kernel (which isn't very often). Talk about a warm fuzzy feeling.
Speak before you think
What a tiny world you must live in, I know several medical organizations (with 10K+ employees) still running NT on their workstations.
Sun produces patches in support for Solaris two years after the last ship date, and ends support five years after the last ship date. That has them creating patches for Solaris 7 until next August and phase 2 support for Solaris 2.5.1 ending next September.
The "window system" is not inside the kernel. The *display system* (somewhat similar to X) runs in kernel *space* - a different thing.
Likely this means the end of knowledge base updates to it. The info will still be there, but it will be static (unless of course, some third party takes up the job of maintaining the knowledge base)
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Sales:
Support:
Oracle generally support the RDBMS for 4 years or so after release, but support doesn't cease all at once. Like MS, they phase it out. For example, 8.1.7 was officially desupported as of December 31, 2004 - it was first released in 2000, I think - so most customers don't get bugs fixed any more, unless they pay for a higher support level. Even then, bug fixes stop at the end of 2006.
(Oracle used to provide a last-ditch "support" service for *very* old RDBMS versions, where they gave you the source code and told you to fix it yourself, but they don't do that these days.)
I however managed to get 1 linux box into production running some web services such as a frontend to our call logging database and an inventory management program, both of which i wrote myself.
All of the windows servers have a scheduled job to restart them weekly in the early hours of the morning so they work properly, and my box has an uptime of around 120 days ATM. It would be more too, except the power to the room is a bit average, even though it has 2 huge UPSs and 2 seperate power feeds.
No beer, no TV make Lifthrasir something something
I only WISH a Unix/Linux vendor had the support MS does for thier legacy products!
Here is Sun's Solaris lifecycle. In fact, it looks like the latest patch cluster for Solaris 2.5.1 came out in September. Solaris 2.5.1 first shipped in 1996.
-- Microsoft is the most expensive commodity operating system and office suite vendor in the marketplace.
Microsoft does support NT 4 -- if you have a custom support agreement. There just isn't any more free fixes.
There are military deployments where NT 4 will be running until 2015 at the earliest.
On the flip side, consider also that there is plenty of Sun kit running SunOS 4 laying about as well.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/bulletin /MS03-007.mspx
[quote]There's a lot of other things that, if you're running MS systems, really make a difference. NT4, if IIS hangs, you're rebooting (and that might take 30 minutes unless you hit the power switch because the processor locks).[/quote] Nice thought, but not true. If IIS4 on NT4 takes a dive and becomes completely unresponsive to attempts to restart the service, 9 out of 10 times you can still fix it in ~20 seconds or so without a reboot simply by killing both the web publishing service and the inetinfo.exe process using the 'kill.exe' command line tool that is found in NT4's option pack. (It also works great on win2000/XP)) Indispensible utility, most of the processes that are 'unkillable' from the task manager can succesfully be stopped with it.