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.
Rhel 5? I hope y’all are using microsegmentation and have a good firewall…JFC
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?
…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.
Cool, welcome to reality where I don’t think you will ever find a organization that is healthy head to toe.
Honestly I don’t think they exist at all but I know you’ll come back with some nitpick cherrypicked example as “proof”
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.
“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!)
