RHEL 7 and RHEL 5 need to be flipped in your meme.
Any large enterprise still running RHEL 5 in Prod (or even, yes, older RHEL versions) has fully accepted the risks and will grumble about supporting it, but go forward with whatever workarounds are necessary to keep the application running on it running. The RHEL 7 folks, however, are modern enough that the answer for any problem is “Upgrade to RHEL 9, because we know you can with some effort, because we don’t want to waste time on supporting something you should be able to upgrade away from”.
This is the game of chicken in a modern enterprise for app teams. If their application is critical enough to business continuity and they remain on RHEL 7 long enough, they too will join the select few applications in the org that either get a cash injection for an application rewrite to modern RHEL 9 or be enshrined next to the RHEL 5 apps still running with grumbling, but continued support.
In a perfect world these EOL unsupported OSes should be retired and replaced with modern supported version, but we’re talking about reality now which is what the modern enterprise is, and which is far far from the perfect world.
What’s blowing my mind about this entire thread is the “rewrite application to support RHEL9” thing I keep seeing. What the fuck applications are y’all running that are so tightly bound to the OS that they can’t handle library and/or kernel updates?
Most of the time I’ve run into this its COTS software and the customer refuses to pay for the cost of the updated version or the company that wrote the original COTS application is long since out of business.
That’s what I’m thinking too but then remember my first corporate job where the application depended on an exact subversion of Java 8, no earlier and no later. This was in 2021. Knowing that company I’d bet they’re still rocking the same setup.
Any large enterprise still running RHEL 5 in Prod (or even, yes, older RHEL versions) has fully accepted the risks
It is more like ‘involuntarily end up riding the risks of using unsupported old software’. RHEL 7 and RHEL 5 are in the right order.
RHEL sells an unrealistic expectation that you don’t need to worry about the OS for another 10 years, so the enterprise gets designed around it and becomes unable to handle an OS upgrade, ever.
It is more like ‘involuntarily end up riding the risks of using unsupported old software’.
Involuntarily? An org choosing to use an EOL OS to keep running an application is a business choice that accepts the risk of compromise/lack of support of an EOL OS. Any org in this situation has 3 choices:
- deprecate the application entirely closing down that line of business the application was supporting
- rewrite/replace the application to maintain the line of business on a modern supported OS
- continue to run the EOL OS and accept the risks
There’s nothing involuntary here.
- Struggle to come to a conclusion on what to do with the EOL OS because of internal political factors and the reality of how enterprise works.
This is the involuntary choice. If you cannot choose from the first three, you end up implicitly choosing the fourth.
Your #4 is the same as my #3. Play out your #4 and it ends up as my #3:
- Struggle to come to a conclusion on what to do with the EOL OS because of internal political factors and the reality of how enterprise works.
Security or Compliance teams raise the concern with continuing to run the EOL OS, they demand the App team power down the offending servers or upgrade. App team escalates to leadership advocating for the upgrade and they ask for the funding. Leadership asks for a business case justifying the large spend requiring the ROI numbers. App team mostly shrugs because the ROI are intangibles of security or support-ability. Leadership sees no immediate monetary benefit being realized in the next 2 quarters from a costly upgrade and instead chooses to accept the risk. They send an exception order to Security or Compliance teams that this EOL OS should continue running as is and the App team shouldn’t be bothered anymore.
…and we end up with my #3.
Some manufacturers machines still run dos
You aren’t using a EOL system in production right? If you are it better be air gapped. The last thing we need is more zombie machines for the botnets.
Air gapped but my dad recently upgraded a RHEL 3
Still working on getting the okay to upgrade the XP machines
“What do you mean? That’s the clinical best practise!!” - Siemens healthcare/Philips or any other medical vendor
(and I’m not talking about air gaps!)
Rhel 5? I hope y’all are using microsegmentation and have a good firewall…JFC
…hope…
Why are you ok with this?
I am not. I worked hard to make our application support RHEL 8 and then RHEL 9. And then the politics takes over and the big wigs start an extended bickering over who should pay for the OS upgrade… which never happens. Sometimes hardware partners don’t support the upgrades, which means OS upgrades also end up requiring new hardware.
I blame Redhat.
Surely your pay is much more than a RHEL license.
If nothing else you could move to Debian or Rocky Linux.
There is something you need to know about collective wisdom; the larger the org is, the lower it gets. Yes the application works on Alma 8 and 9, but the management says ‘no’.
Yes and no
A healthy organization shouldn’t be having this issue.
The only way that will work is to somehow quit and rejoin as a much more highly paid consultant and enable them to upgrade EOL software in prod. I am actually considering this.
IT installed a firewall between the legacy environment and everything else. Devs threw a fit and so the firewall was configured with a default allow rule. Security was last seen crying into their beer.
I’d get out before it implodes. This sounds like a poorly managed company. When something bad happens they will find escape goats.
they will find escape goats.
Well now I want to stick around. Who wouldn’t want an escape goat?
Unsupported versions are unsupported.
mission critical, but not enough to warrant a budget for redundancy.
Weird how that works…
It might be time to upgrade
HPC? Fuck we can’t change shit in HPC. We tried a few times… Some sites appear manage it, but tend to forget a few dozen systems.
I understand how it feels.
