RHEL 7 systems will become EOL at September 1st 00:00 (UTC).
At that moment, the DA service (all by itself) will stop checking for updates in normal release channels (
alpha
,
beta
,
current
,
stable
) and will switch to a special
rhel7
release channel. There are already a couple of such EOL release channels:
rhel6
,
debian8
,
debian9
, and
freebsd
. EOL channels do not normally get any updates or new DA versions. Having a dedicated release channel for the EOL distro gives us the option to push out an update if we really need to. We do release an update when we need to change licensing code to stay compatible with license server changes or if a critical security vulnerability is discovered.
In general, everything will continue to work. After some time, CustomBuild might start failing because some resources will no longer be available on the internet. Then we will push out an update to the EOL release channel to disable CustomBuild completely. For example, the
rhel6
EOL release channel now has a build where CB just refuses to run. However, we will not kill CB while it still works fine. It is hard to tell when CB will fall apart on its own. For RHEL6, it was quite fast because we stopped hosting some software packages on our mirrors and started downloading them from upstream. Now most of the packages are from upstream, so my guess is that CB will stay alive longer.
@ccto, Staying on the EOL release channel is smoother compared to disabling automatic updates and running some arbitrary old DA build. In general, old DA builds (that are not in release channels) might stop working due to licensing system changes. Release channels get updates to avoid that.