Notice of dropping support for old OS's

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With several OSs long since being in end-of-life status, we're giving 3 months notice for the discontinued support for these very old OSs.

DA 1.42.2 will likely be the final release for the mentioned OSs, and the binaries will likely be able to be downloaded until the 6 month period has expired.

The cutoff will be June 18, 2013.

The list of discontinued OSs is as follows:
  • CentOS 3
  • Fedora 4, 5, 6
  • FreeBSD 4
  • RedHat 7.2, 8, 9
These changes really shouldn't affect anyone.. if you are using one of these OSs, it's best you update anyway.

The supported list of OSs has been updated now (so nobody "accidentally" installs an old one)

John
 
Last edited:
A few reasons... for now, it's because our FreeBSD 5 box holds the core templates/files, and serves them over the network file system to the newer versions, so it's alive anyway (same for Debian 4)
Also, it's that this is the first time we're dropping OSs, so we'll start with the most extreme end, and see how it goes.
As time progresses, we'll drop more.

John
 
If possible, may I suggest to add a bit longer notice? e.g. 6 or 12 months
or a roadmap/schedule for discontinued OS.

Thank you for your kind attention.
 
Hello,

Sure no problem. I'll bump it to 6 months.

Effective date will then be:

June 18th, 2013

John
 
Now as long as we don't all wait four or five months before we think about it.

Note to everyone:

Let's think about this now; and not wait just because John has given us more time.

Jeff
 
John,

Many of the versions you still have up are no longer being supported by the Vendor. I would suggest modifying your policy to 1 year after the EOL date of the OS or 5-6 years, whichever is less. Whenever I look at software, the release schedule and EOL cycle is a crucial factor. I think it would benefit DA to have a consistent policy.

EOL Dates
Centos 4 February 2012
Fedora 7 June 2008
Fedora 8 January 2009
FreeBSD 5.5 May 2008
FreeBSD 6.4 November 2010
FreeBSD 7.4 February 2013
Debian 4 February 2010
Debian 5 February 2012

Kevin
 
Thanks Kevin,

I'm actually in favor of such a policy.
Discussion is welcome, but something consistent like that would keep it clear for everyone.

John
 
I would suggest not choosing a date yet for most recent versons of any OS Distribution, even if the distributor as set an EOL date, because new versions could be delayed for one of many reasons.

Just my opinion :).

Jeff
 
After a few reports of updates issues on older Fedora boxes, I've swapped the download of Fedora binaries to use the static CentOS 4 binaries.
They've proven themselves very handy as the go-to binary package for linking issue in may cases.
You can still run your Fedora box with them, as our end-of-life for Fedora is not until October 2013.
http://help.directadmin.com/item.php?id=497

John
 
Hi,

Now when you are dropping support for freebsd 7 and 8 (in a while) it had been great to have 9/32 bit support so we can upgrade the OS to version 9 and still have support without using compat packages.
 
I'm not sure when FreeBSD 10 is being released.. it may make sense to add 32-bit at that time, if there is enough demand.

John
 
The point is just to have an option when you are running 32bit servers (other then to migrate to a new server), So FreeBSD 10 is no problem as long as it is something with 32 bit support.
 
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