HEADS UP: FreeBSD 5.3, 5.4, 6.0 EoLs coming soon

[Philippe Pegon]

FreeBSD Security Officer wrote:
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> Hello Everyone,

Hi,

> On October 31st, FreeBSD 5.3 and FreeBSD 5.4 will have reached their
> End of Life and will no longer be supported by the FreeBSD Security
> Team.  Users of either of those FreeBSD releases are strongly encouraged
> to upgrade to FreeBSD 5.5 or FreeBSD 6.1 before that date.
> 
> In addition, the FreeBSD 6.0 End of Life is presently scheduled for
> November 30th.  Depending upon the progress of the FreeBSD 6.2 release
> cycle, this may be delayed until December 31st in order to allow time
> for users of FreeBSD 6.0 to upgrade to FreeBSD 6.2.

I'm a bit worried about the EoL of FreeBSD 6.0.

In June 2006, I opened a PR (kern/98622) about a regression on CARP
with IPv6 addresses: CARP is not usable with IPv6. Since I tracked
down the culprit commit (see appropriate info in the PR), I can
affirm that this regression appeared before the 6.1-RELEASE.

Some of our main servers provide redundant services (DNS, Webmail,
LDAP) based on CARP, with equivalent functionnality over IPv4 or
IPv6.  Since we cannot degrade IPv6 service, our servers are stick
to 6.0-RELEASE. This problem has been reported to re@, but the TODO
list for 6.2 doesn't mention it (it is still empty, in fact).

As a campus network operator, we are proud to offer bleeding edge
service to our 50K users, and we advocate FreeBSD locally since it
was the ideal OS to run IPv6 service.

In order to continue to provide IPv6 service, do we have to run an
obsolete system (with all security risks involved), or do we have
to choose another system?

Please, either support 6.0-RELEASE longer, or (better) help us
correct this problem!

Thanks in advance,

Philippe Pegon