RedHat 9 End of life
 

I was just wondering what everyone thought about RedHat bring all of its official free versions of Linux to an end.

I know they still have the Fudora Project but that is not really supported and its not completely stable so not suitable for some servers such as a web server.

So I find myself in an odd position, I have a RedHat 9 and a RedHat 7.3 server hosted remotely so I can not really change the Distro myself and I am stuck with two machines that will not have simple updates available.

So just wanted to hear what others had to say on the issue.

If you're running a server I would use debian woody (probably comparable to your 7.3 in terms of package versions and maintained with security updates on a regular basis) or slackware (simple and stable). Fedora is buggy but not any more so than RH9 IMHO. I would actually say that Fedora is more supported than RH9 considering it has a community maintaining and building packages including third party multimedia apps.

RH choice is clear: if you have a mid to large company, and you want a stable and supported OS, you can pay them well for RHEL. They're going to use some of this cash to help developing free Fedora, in order to include its code in future versions. They're basically giving up earning in home market to concentrate on enterprises, IMHO that's a sort of silent agreement with MDK.
This is a questionable policy, but as a matter of fact we're not in charge of this choice. Moreover, showing there's good earning in free software, too, is not a bad thing in itself.
So what can you do? Either trust Fedora, switch to Debian, buy RHEL or install rpm upgrades by hand.

I was a bit concerned when I first heard of this.... about 5 or 6 months ago. But I'm running Fedora Core 1 (as well as several other, older RH installs going back to RH 6.1) and I'm really happy with FC1. Avaliable updaters include apt, yum, current and up2date. The community support, both on the Fedora list

http://fedora.redhat.com/participate/communicate

and forums such as this one is excellent.

For your server, you may want to consider one of the RHEL products, especially if you consider it to be "mission critical" but if you've been using RHL products in the past without purchasing support, give Fedora a look. I don't see that it's any buggier than the previous RHL releases.

One other possibility would be to take a look at the Fedora Legacy project (google it, it's out there). They are working at providing extended support (errata and etc.) for EOL'd RHL/FC releases.

HTH

Jim Dishaw

I do not consider the server to be mission critical since it is just used as a webhost and some various other webbased features. But when it is down we do lose in terms of visitors since they no longer think our site is stable and also we lose the money from the ads that go to pay for the site.

The only thing that I am worried about is that I can not really upgrade the machines to any other OS (RedHat or other Distro) since I do not have physical access to the machine. As of yet the server hosting company has not offered a change in OS and I am sure when they do there will be a fee associated with it.

So for the time being when RedHat 9 comes to its End of Life I will be forced to stick with it and manually upgrade anything that needs to be, which will make my life harder.