End of Life is Meaningless

[Rick N]

 You already know your answer:

 Every one of our SunE10K's, E6500's, and i think now our E4900's are EOL, according to Sun :), but we keep them running ship-shape(updates et all) and they have paid for themselves over n over again. 

However, we have a (mirrored) Development department that tests these things (as carefully as we can), before major upgrades/OS updates.


 I hear ya, Murphy's Law, but also and even more so these days, If your Pruduction dept. is that important then so should  your Development dept. be -without which Production will not absorb future changes reliably.

 All this depends on what you're using your present servers for?. Ours were heavily transaction/oracle based, along with our FreeBSD apache web server farms'... so I'm sorry if this doesn't giude/or match you much.

 

 For example, we still "only" use our OpenBSD vpn/firewall server, its now 6 years old and other than 6 reboots (2 due to 2 elect.outages) it simply worked fine, our network admin finally upgraded it, and performance-wise its much better. Yes, this was situational, but it worked like a charm. This was after we used a $600 (used) Dell-x86-arch system to test it prior (at 4:00AM u know what I mean). There were of course, a couple problems unfortunately to our customers' chagrin, but we didn't lose those cutomers and the benefits now were well worth it.

 

 But yes, I aggree with you, EOL means nuthin' (why?, just beacuse some manufacturer' wants you to spend more money?)-however, "support" means everything (be it HW/SW) that we all know.

 It's oviously a sutuational (money-dependent) judgement call. 

 You can wait 'till you "need" to change/upgrade/update which may be a very fatal gamble?, OR,

You test it before. I'd rather have some kind of dev/testing than the alternative. -be it whatever?

 

cheers.

 

Rick.

 

 

> Date: Mon, 4 May 2009 17:58:22 -0700
> From: jcw at highperformance.net
> To: freebsd-chat at freebsd.org
> Subject: End of Life is Meaningless
> 
> That should be read as "End of Life" is meaningless. Not end of "Life 
> is Meaningless." Life is still meaningless, as is this post if you 
> disagree.
> 
> It mystifies me that there is this recent tendency for people to get 
> concerned about EOL. "What do I do?" My answer, "Do nothing." Just 
> because a FreeBSD version is EOL doesn't mean you have to stop using 
> it. It doesn't mean that your particular version is suddenly prone to 
> downtime. It doesn't mean you can't install patches even though the 
> secteam won't be updating CVS. It doesn't mean you can't continue to 
> develop applications for a major version.
> 
> EOL is a tool for FreeBSD to manage its own house. It is in no way a 
> directive on how you should manage your house. Queue someone still 
> running 2.1.5 with uptime stats. Come on. You know you want to show off.
> 
> To the people who have to manage limited resources and must therefore 
> implement an EOL policy. I commend you on the balancing act. Good on ya 
> mates. Your doing a fine job.
> 
> Regards,
> Jason
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