Red Hat Enterprise Linux 2.1 - 1-Year End Of Life Notice

> If you're not getting patches for years

Not getting them from Red Hat != not getting them at all...  That's the great
thing about open source (and, being a programmer ;-)): you can fix stuff
yourself, if the need arises...

> So unless all the mail related stuff is actually hand maintained

Oh, it is...  We've upgraded the sendmail many times in the past for previous
issues...  Had to hand-build our own RPMs, often applying our own patches and
tweaks to get things working right, but like I say, that's one of the major
benefits of open source...

And, actually being an ancient system tends to work in our favor securitywise,
in a purely "security by obscurity" way: the script-kiddies and scammers who
just run pre-made exploits generally won't have one that'll run on a system
that old...  "Security by obsolescence", if you will... ;-)

I certainly wouldn't recommend everyone and their mothers run ancient systems
like that, of course...  If you don't know what you're doing and manually
keep things patched up and running properly, you'll have big problems, as
you point out...  But, if you know what you're doing, and value stability
of the system over the time it takes to keep it running as-is, then there's
nothing wrong with it...  Like I say, that's really one of the hugest benefits
of open source, IMHO: the ability to keep old software running for as long
as you need it to, without being forced into an unnecessary upgrade cycle...
Not everyone CAN or SHOULD do it, but for those that can and need to, it's
an incredibly powerful benefit...