FreeBSD 4.x EoL

[Robert Watson]

On Tue, 17 Oct 2006, security wrote:

>   You'll have the sources.  If you're using 4.11 in a business, you need to 
> decide if it's more cost effective to move on to 6 or hire someone to keep 
> 4.11 running.  There's compat_4 to keep most userland apps happy.  I'm sure 
> you could argue the various design issues to your hearts content on the news 
> groups, but practically speaking, I don't have an issue with this.  Nor is 
> it all that different from your typical paid for support model for a 
> proprietary OS.
>
> It's not like the poor folks that got stuck with a business app that was 
> locked to win95 or 98 with bizarre undocumented API's

While possibly not advisable in the long term, I ran a 4.x postfix and cyrus 
server install on 6.x using compat4 for about six months without problems. 
The place where it gets tricky is updating the 4.x binaries, which requires a 
4.x chroot, since I was running a native 6.x userland for everything else. 
I've now gotten over that, but it worked quite well and was extremely useful 
that I could avoid doing the upgrade all at once -- upgrade the OS first, let 
it settle, then upgrade the applications.  The only issue I ran into was 
actually that the location of the Cyrus sasl unix domain socket had moved, and 
once I tracked that down, all was well (so not a FreeBSD nit, an application 
nit).

Robert N M Watson
Computer Laboratory
University of Cambridge