The end for Red Hat Linux 6.2 and 7 [LWN.net]

From:		Mark J Cox <mjc@redhat.com>
To:		redhat-watch-list@redhat.com, <redhat-announce-list@redhat.com>
Subject:		End of Life: Red Hat Linux 6.2, 7
Date:		Wed, 2 Apr 2003 17:47:56 +0100 (BST)

In accordance with our errata support policy the Red Hat Linux 6.2 and Red
Hat Linux 7 distributions have now reached their end-of-life for errata
maintenance.  This means that we will no longer be producing security,
bugfix, or enhancement updates for these products.

If you are a paid subscriber to Red Hat Network, you can download ISO
images of Red Hat Linux 7.1, 7.2, 7.3, 8.0, and 9 today to update your
system.  See http://rhn.redhat.com/

If you are looking for a Red Hat Linux distribution that has longer
maintenance periods, check out Red Hat Enterprise Linux which offers
lifecycles of 3+ years.  See http://www.redhat.com/software/rhel/

The errata support policy, as well as our current errata and advisories,
are available from http://www.redhat.com/apps/support/errata/






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The end for Red Hat Linux 6.2 and 7

Posted Apr 2, 2003 16:54 UTC (Wed) by rjamestaylor (guest, #339) [Link] (8 responses)

Could someone explain to me why no security updates for still-widely-used distribution versions is a Good Thing?

The end for Red Hat Linux 6.2 and 7

Posted Apr 2, 2003 17:10 UTC (Wed) by proski (guest, #104) [Link] (5 responses)

Because Red Hat won't spend money on producing those fixes. It's costs some money to keep machines with old Red Hat versions, compile and verify bugfixes for each of them. Also, Red Hat will hopefully get more sales of the higher priced distribution. More money for Red Hat means (hopefully) more money for Red Hat developers, including such giants as Alan Cox.

On the negative side, systems with old Red Hat become unsafe to use after the next hole is discovered. This can be alleviated by upgrading those systems to new distributions. Responsible sysadmins will do something, careless sysadmins are already a problem.

It is also possible that alternative providers of security patches for older systems will emerge, althought I don't think it would be a good business model right now.

They Might Be Giants

Posted Apr 2, 2003 17:14 UTC (Wed) by xoddam (subscriber, #2322) [Link]

Alan's not that tall, really.

The end for Red Hat Linux 6.2 and 7

Posted Apr 2, 2003 18:18 UTC (Wed) by tjc (guest, #137) [Link] (3 responses)

It is also possible that alternative providers of security patches for older systems will emerge [snip]

It will be interesting to see if a community-based project emerges to fill the gap here. It's my gut feeling that most of the complaints are just noise coming from people who have already upgraded to a newer version, or maybe don't even use Red Hat in the first place, but we shall see. I guess this is a test to see if that "scratch an itch" thing (however that goes) is really true.

How many itching Red Hat Linux 6.2 users are really out there? :^)

The end for Red Hat Linux 6.2 and 7

Posted Apr 2, 2003 19:26 UTC (Wed) by mtrudelm (guest, #4922) [Link] (1 responses)

I use RH linux 6.2 on my old laptop and up until now found it really easy to upgrade software. Ximian support 6.2, Mozilla is build against glibc 2.1 (C library for 6.2) and there is still many rpm's produce for this distribution. So my guess is that it's still widely used.

For me, there's not much choice for upgrade. CD drive is broke and hard disk is full... and there's all those recompiled module drivers...

The end for Red Hat Linux 6.2 and 7

Posted Apr 2, 2003 20:04 UTC (Wed) by proski (guest, #104) [Link]

You can try upgrading by apt-get from http://apt.freshrpms.net/

I recently upgraded my laptop from Red Hat 7.2 to 8.0 using apt-get. First apt-get upgraded packages for most simple cases, when no packages need to be removed or installed. Then I ran "apt-get install" on the remaining "held" packages and resolved the dependencies.

The end for Red Hat Linux 6.2 and 7

Posted Apr 17, 2003 20:38 UTC (Thu) by gswoods (subscriber, #37) [Link]

I have one system that runs RH 6.2 . What it actually has is a VA Linux
enhanced version of it, with special kernel drivers for the hardware
RAID device that the system uses. VA Linux, of course, is long gone in
terms of supporting this system. Now, newer Linux kernels *may* have
a driver for this particular device, but I don't know this for sure,
so I cannot simply pop in a Red Hat 7.3 or whatever disc and do the
usual upgrade, or even another distro like Debian. Combine that with the fact that this is a dual-processor system with many production users, and you can then see why it is still running 6.2 . Stability is by far the
most important thing, so it doesn't get upgraded until there is really
no alternative. In order to upgrade, I will have to do a considerable
amount of research, including re-familiarizing myself with the RAID
controller that I haven't looked at in years and finding out if there
is even still a driver for it out there.

This is said only so that I can provide an example of something other than
"lazy sysadmin" as a reason for continuing to run Red Hat 6.2. All this said, I do not blame Red Hat for end-of-lifing it. You cannot support old
software forever. And I may well continue to run 6.2 long after updates
for it stop coming out. I protect the system with ipchains so that it
is not directly accessible from the Internet. I realize that I will have
to take special security measures if I want to run no-longer-supported
software. And I will eventually have to upgrade, it's just hard to find a block of time when 1) I have the extra time needed for this upgrade; and 2) The production users on the system aren't balls-to-the-wall trying to finish some data analysis before the next big conference. Shit happens.

Upgrade options

Posted Apr 2, 2003 17:14 UTC (Wed) by wstearns (guest, #4102) [Link]

Redhat has decided not to put more time into producing updates for these systems. If someone else - yourself perhaps? - decides to take on this role, you certainly can, and you'd be providing a valuable service to all the redhat 6.2 and 7.0 users.
Users are left with a number of viable alternatives: upgrade to a newer distribution (at no monetary cost, but some time involved), provide their own upgrades (either seperately or as a group), or hire someone or some company to provide those upgrades.

The end for Red Hat Linux 6.2 and 7

Posted Apr 2, 2003 17:17 UTC (Wed) by smoogen (subscriber, #97) [Link]

First, I am betting that the numbers of 6.2 machines is less than 10% of the install base (if they follow what 5.2 numbers where this time in the life-cycle).

Second, very very very few of those people are paying Red Hat to spend engineering time on 6.2 or 7. Not enough to cover the cost of an engineer.

So it is basic economics at work. Not enough people pay, no one gets updates because to do the updates would not break at least even or the mythical 10%.

The costs involved would be:
Keeping a build machine active/working with 6.2
Keeping 4 QA machines active/working with 6.2
[subtract these 5 machines from room available for 7.1/7.2/7.3/8.0/9/2.1
etc machines.]

Keeping an engineer and 1-2 QA people concentrating on 6.2 versus newer stuff. The reason you keep them on legacy.. is that you quickly forget all the quirks of the old system that were either fixed, dropped, or re-invented in a later version.

There are the additional overhead costs for this.. and Red Hat is seeing most of the people download the code for free... so its all negative revenue.

So people using Linux are going to learn the hard lesson of Free Software. The initial costs are much lower, but if you want maintenance.. you will have to pay for it because the companies are not getting the 80% premiums that closed source software companies get to do the maintenance for free.

By the way, there are private consultant companies like owlriver.com that you can always pay for maintenance of 6.2 later on.. but you aren't going to get it for free.

Two choices: too short or too long?

Posted Apr 2, 2003 19:17 UTC (Wed) by ronaldcole (guest, #1462) [Link] (5 responses)

Red Hat's "one year" life cycle for their non-Enterprise distro is definitely too short for my taste. I can't get very excited about the prospect of upgrading my servers every year. However, the Enterprise distros are too expensive and I'm definitely not going to be running them for their three-plus year life cycle, if only because such a distro would be outright ancient by the time I felt I got my money's worth out of it.

Two years on a distro for my servers seems to be about right for me. Looks like I get to seek out my third choice: a distro with support that works the way I work... the way Red Hat used to.

Two choices: too short or too long?

Posted Apr 2, 2003 19:30 UTC (Wed) by smoogen (subscriber, #97) [Link] (2 responses)

Good luck.. I think you are with Debian as Mandrake, SuSE, etc seem to be heading for the same terms.

Two choices: too short or too long?

Posted Apr 2, 2003 20:35 UTC (Wed) by rknop (guest, #66) [Link]

...although if Debian follows past suit, it will be a year and a half between stable releases anyway.

-Rob

Two choices: too short or too long?

Posted Apr 3, 2003 14:29 UTC (Thu) by zipdisk (guest, #8589) [Link]

According to SuSE web pages you have at least two years of support for your
distro. Mandrake web site also mention that you will have 12 months for desktop
packages and 18 months for base packages. I don't know debian policy but i think it
must be similar somehow.

Two choices: too short or too long?

Posted Apr 2, 2003 19:41 UTC (Wed) by skvidal (guest, #3094) [Link]

One suggestion I would make is to do this sort of thing on a community basis.
It wouldn't take the most amazing of people to watch bugtraq, watch redhat-watch and monitor the list of pkgs in 6.2, 7.0 etc and do this for only a year.

It would provide that additional year and it would give people an easier method to migrate there. Debian gets security fixes out - it's not like there is anything special about a company doing it (excluding vendor-sec which is another issue altogether)

But the point is that if you're interested in 2 yrs of security patches chances are others are too. And those people might be willing to work with you to divide the labor.

Go bug Warren Togami at the fedora project (http://fedora.us) see if he can point you at other people wanting to do security updates for older releases of red hat linux.

I think people at large can do this - they just have to be willing to try.
-sv

Two choices: too short or too long?

Posted Apr 2, 2003 23:22 UTC (Wed) by tjc (guest, #137) [Link]

Red Hat's "one year" life cycle for their non-Enterprise distro is definitely too short for my taste.

Someone on one of the RH mailing lists suggested that RH change the life cycle to 15 months, which I think makes a lot of sense. There's a new release of RHL every 6 months or so, and providing updates for an additional 3 months would give some slack to sysadmins that have a large number of system to upgrade. With a 12 month life cycle you almost have to upgrade on every release.

Comercial support for redhat 6.2 and 7.0

Posted Apr 3, 2003 8:22 UTC (Thu) by cdamian (subscriber, #1271) [Link] (2 responses)

I hope some company will come up with comercial support for redhat 7.0 at a reasonable price.

We use both versions at our company. While I could do withouth 6.2, which is only used on file and mail servers, I can't really do without 7.0, because all our development workstations and servers run this version. We have a lot of our own RPMs which depend on software versions only in redhat 7.0.

The only sensible upgrade path is advanced server anyway, because otherwise we invest a lot of money into the upgrade to 7.3 or 8.0 now which will be obsolete in eight months time.

Comercial support for redhat 6.2 and 7.0

Posted Apr 4, 2003 10:09 UTC (Fri) by stock (guest, #5849) [Link] (1 responses)

> hope some company will come up with comercial support for redhat 7.0 at a
>reasonable price.

>We use both versions at our company. While I could do withouth 6.2, which
is only used on file and mail servers, I can't really do without 7.0, because all
our development workstations and servers run this version. We have a lot of
our own RPMs which depend on software versions only in redhat 7.0.

> The only sensible upgrade path is advanced server anyway, because
otherwise we invest a lot of money into the upgrade to 7.3 or 8.0 now which
will be obsolete in eight months time.

Going to advanced server because of redhat's new support policy's is not
what i call a sane business decision. You only start to pay lots more for the
same you have been running for a long time. Running your intel iron on
RedHat Advanced Server has nothing to do with Linux, free or open source.

You just run a hip trendy commercial unix alike OS, which consist's of killer
apps like perl5 , apache , linux kernel, mysql, php, GNOME, KDE, cups and
of course the FSF GNU software components. These killer components can all
be downloaded for free on the internet. Only difference is you pay a lot more
and have better support. Now a solid product never needed much support.
businesses connecting their core linux servers to the internet to get updates
from redhat network seems like a hoax story IMHO.

Robert

Comercial support for redhat 6.2 and 7.0

Posted Apr 8, 2003 17:08 UTC (Tue) by rwmj (subscriber, #5474) [Link]

I think you'd be surprised by the large numbers of customers who are queuing up to buy Advanced Server (we have to call it Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS now) and RHN subs. These are big ticket, expensive items, so you might wonder why companies would buy these things when they can, in your words, "download [them] for free on the internet". The reason is that for these customers the cost of RHEL AS or an RHN sub for every machine they use is small beans compared to the high level of service they require and get from Red Hat. These are banks, large insurance companies, video production facilities and so on, and their techies are paid high enough salaries that they can't be sitting around all day downloading stuff off the internet and cobbling it together to make it work.

(Disclaimer: I work for Red Hat)

Rich.