End of RedHat support

magnafix

With RedHat ending support for so many versions of RedHat Linux on December 31st (http://www.redhat.com/apps/support/errata/), how are other hosting companies that run RH dealing with this?

Seems the choices are:

1) continue to run the free version and upgrade the OS of all your servers every year
2) pay $349 per server per year so you can get bug and security patches for 5 years
3) dump RH and take your chances another distro
4) do nothing and cross your fingers, rolling your own security patches

There are benefits and hardships associated with each option.

No matter what, this is going to be expensive in either time or money for everyone.

stolzyboy

most hosts are members of the RHN (Red Hat Network(which you can subscribe to via command line on your own boxes)), and that will still post security holes/patches, i don't see anyone hurredly upgrading, they may do it over time and still subscribe to the RHN

magnafix

That's the point -- RHN will do you no good as of December 31st unless you're already running RH 9 on your servers. RedHat will simply not provide patches for security and bug fixes once the product's "end of life" has been reached.

stolzyboy

also notice it says something like "At certain times, Red Hat may extend errata maintenance for certain popular releases of the operating system."

i'm guessing that 8 will be supported for quite a while, and i really couldn't be convinced for sure that that was part of RHN or not, as long as you pay the whatever a year, you should be able to get security fixes for it, if not that is pretty lame, especially for RH8, which hasn't been out for very long

magnafix

Interesting theory, but RH says that support for RH8 will end on Dec 31st.

Is anyone here running production RH 7.x servers? What's your plan?

dalecosp

According to Netcraft, the plan is:

Install FreeBSD!!!

http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2003/07/12/nearly_2_million_active_sites_running_freebsd.html
http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2003/07/08/most_reliable_and_fastest_hosting_company_sites_during_june.html

FreeBSD is free in both the sense of "No $!" and "unencumbered by such things as SCO lawsuits" ....

Not that many folks think Linux is in much danger, either, though, from the look of it ...