Topic: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 One-Year Retirement Notice

[TerryF]

If you are still using SME8 its time that you begin the process of upgrading to SME9.

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                   Red Hat Security Advisory

Synopsis:          Low: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 One-Year Retirement Notice
Advisory ID:       RHSA-2016:0561-02
Product:           Red Hat Enterprise Linux
Advisory URL:      https://rhn.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2016-0561.html
Issue date:        2016-03-31
Updated on:        2016-04-19
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1. Summary:

This is the One-Year notification for the retirement of Red Hat Enterprise
Linux 5. This notification applies only to those customers subscribed to
the channel for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.

[Updated 19 April 2016]
This advisory has been updated with a corrected list of architectures
supported with the RHEL 5 Extended Life Cycle Support (ELS) Add-On.

2. Relevant releases/architectures:

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (v. 5 server) - i386, ia64, ppc, s390x, x86_64
Red Hat Enterprise Linux Desktop (v. 5 client) - i386, x86_64

3. Description:

In accordance with the Red Hat Enterprise Linux Errata Support Policy,
support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 will be retired on March 31, 2017,
at the end of Production Phase 3. Until that date, customers will continue
to receive Critical impact security patches and selected urgent priority
bug fixes for RHEL 5.11 (the final RHEL 5 release). On that date, active
support included with your RHEL Premium or Standard subscription will
conclude. This means that customers will continue to have access to all
previously released (RHEL 4, RHEL 5, etc.) content. In addition, limited
technical support will be available through Red Hat's Global Support
Services as described in the Knowledge Base article available at
https://access.redhat.com/articles/64664 (search for "non-current minor
release").

However, we recognize that some customers will wish to remain on Red Hat
Enterprise Linux 5 even after the March 31, 2017 retirement date. To meet
this customer requirement, Red Hat will offer customers the option to
purchase the Extended Life Cycle Support (ELS) Add-On as an annually
renewable subscription. This ELS Add-On provides customers with up to an
additional three and a half (3.5) years of Critical impact security fixes
and selected urgent priority bug fixes for RHEL 5.11. RHEL 5 ELS coverage
will conclude on November 30, 2020.

Note that the RHEL 5 ELS Add-On is available for the x86 (32- and 64-bit)
architecture only. The RHEL 5 ELS Add-On is not available for the Itanium
architecture.

To take advantage of a more comprehensive product support, we encourage
customers to migrate from Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 to a more recent
version. As a benefit of the Red Hat subscription, customers may use their
active subscriptions to entitle any system on any currently supported Red
Hat Enterprise Linux release.

Details of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux life cycle can be found here:
https://access.redhat.com/site/support/policy/updates/errata/

[guest22]

Please be fully aware of the above, and plan your migration well ahead of time...

[ReetP]

Just to clarify a little more this means that CentOS 5, and SME Server v8, go End of Line as well and will no longer be supported.

Time to upgrade to SME v9 as soon as possible.

Remember you CANNOT do an 'in place' upgrade from v8 to v9 due to upstream decisions by RHEL. You will need to do a backup/restore. See the wiki for more details.

We note there are a still a lot of SME v7 boxes still out there which are totally unsupported and they should be upgraded immediately !

B. Rgds
John

[bunkobugsy]

Another upgrade option successfully tested by me is https://wiki.contribs.org/UpgradeDisk#Moving_from_SME_8.x_to_SME_9.x

[janet]

bunkobugsy & all

Another upgrade option successfully tested by me is https://wiki.contribs.org/UpgradeDisk#Moving_from_SME_8.x_to_SME_9.x

This is probably quite an easy solution for most people where the server to be upgraded uses a single disk or RAID1 array with 2 disks.
There is no need to perform a backup first, which can take a long time.
This procedure & functionality was developed by Gordon Rowell, one of the main SME server gurus & developers (with improvements & tweaks by others over time).