FreeBSD 4.x EoL
Robert Watson
rwatson at FreeBSD.org
Thu Oct 19 16:51:14 PDT 2006
On Tue, 17 Oct 2006, security wrote:
> You'll have the sources. If you're using 4.11 in a business, you need to
> decide if it's more cost effective to move on to 6 or hire someone to keep
> 4.11 running. There's compat_4 to keep most userland apps happy. I'm sure
> you could argue the various design issues to your hearts content on the news
> groups, but practically speaking, I don't have an issue with this. Nor is
> it all that different from your typical paid for support model for a
> proprietary OS.
>
> It's not like the poor folks that got stuck with a business app that was
> locked to win95 or 98 with bizarre undocumented API's
While possibly not advisable in the long term, I ran a 4.x postfix and cyrus
server install on 6.x using compat4 for about six months without problems.
The place where it gets tricky is updating the 4.x binaries, which requires a
4.x chroot, since I was running a native 6.x userland for everything else.
I've now gotten over that, but it worked quite well and was extremely useful
that I could avoid doing the upgrade all at once -- upgrade the OS first, let
it settle, then upgrade the applications. The only issue I ran into was
actually that the location of the Cyrus sasl unix domain socket had moved, and
once I tracked that down, all was well (so not a FreeBSD nit, an application
nit).
Robert N M Watson
Computer Laboratory
University of Cambridge
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