No product for small servers [LWN.net]

No product for small servers

Posted Jan 3, 2003 20:37 UTC (Fri) by skarkkai (subscriber, #4128)
Parent article: Distribution support: how long is long enough?

Redhat's new policy makes it very difficult to use Redhat on small servers. Using standard Redhat releases with only one year of support is quite out of the question. No one in their right minds updates a server of any sort once a year, rarely even every two years.

Using the Advanced Server (AS) product on a small server is not justifiable financially. Let's assume a small server hardware costs $4000. The price of AS is $800 per year per server. If the life time of the server is 5 years, which is pretty ordinary, the AS software ends up costing the same amount as the hardware. For most customers, that's not acceptable. Most customers never need the support services that come with AS, they only want the security updates.

It would be a wise decision on Redhat's part to offer a version of AS that comes with no support, and costs say $200 per year per server. That would be the kind of price that one can justify for any server, and would still provide nice income for Redhat.

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small servers shouldn't be using point-oh releases

Posted Jan 4, 2003 3:41 UTC (Sat) by djao (subscriber, #4263) [Link]

No one is suggesting that you run redhat 8.0 on a small server. In fact, I would argue that the only versions of redhat you should ever even consider for a server are the final revisions (4.2, 5.2, 6.2, 7.3) of each major version.

These final revisions have, historically, had much longer than "only one year of support", and I see no reason why the recent announcement would change that.

small servers shouldn't be using point-oh releases

Posted Jan 4, 2003 16:59 UTC (Sat) by skarkkai (subscriber, #4128) [Link]

In an email I got from Redhat's Mark J Cox he listed end of life dates for errata support for some versions:

Red Hat Linux 8.0 (Psyche) December 31, 2003
Red Hat Linux 7.3 (Valhalla) December 31, 2003
Red Hat Linux 7.2 (Enigma) December 31, 2003
Red Hat Linux 7.1 (Seawolf) December 31, 2003
Red Hat Linux 7.0 (Guinness) March 31, 2003
Red Hat Linux 6.2 (Zoot) March 31, 2003

Which gives support lifetime of about 1.5 years for Redhat 7.3.

7.3 lifetime

Posted Jan 4, 2003 17:28 UTC (Sat) by djao (subscriber, #4263) [Link]

Well, I may be wrong, and I will eat my words if I am, but I think redhat 7.3 is the one version out of that list that is likely to have its support life extended past the announced date.