Extended support for EOL distributions/versions?

While I don't have any experience with buying EOL support from these third parties, I do have experience with dealing with EOL versions of CentOS.

In addition to not having an updated set of patches for security vulnerabilities disclosed post-EOL, many supporting tools also use the EOL date to drop support. I have a handful of CentOS 6 hosts that I have to jump through some hoops just to SSH into, because modern versions of OpenSSH have dropped support by default for the cryptographic algorithms that CentOS 6 relies on. Ansible? Datadog? Other third-party tools? All have dropped (or plan to drop) support past EOL. It's unlikely that an extended support agreement with the third-party will do anything to help you in this regard.

Also, looking at TuxCare's site, it looks like their extended EOL patching services covers only a handful of core packages, rather than all OS packages. If you're looking to keep these machines patches against emergency security vulnerabilities, that may not be sufficient.

I'm not sure what you're looking to get out of such a service. If you need technical support past EOL, then it might be worthwhile. If you're looking to keep up to date with security vulnerabilities, I'm not sure if I'd personally bother with such a service.

This is actually the killer feature that keeps me on Ubuntu based distros - LTS releases. Besides having 5 years of security support, you can upgrade in place without migrating. Ubuntu releases them every 2 years in April and existing users can upgrade to them a few months later. I have been doing this for decades. My first laptop was a Dell Ubuntu in 2006, and I upgraded it in place until 2016 when the hardware died.

el_oscuro said:

This is actually the killer feature that keeps me on Ubuntu based distros - LTS releases. Besides having 5 years of security support, you can upgrade in place without migrating. Ubuntu releases them every 2 years in April and existing users can upgrade to them a few months later. I have been doing this for decades. My first laptop was a Dell Ubuntu in 2006, and I upgraded it in place until 2016 when the hardware died.

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I've had very bad luck with Ubuntu upgrades in the past. Unlike the source Debian distro, they don't seem to test upgrades all that well, and if you're doing much of anything unusual, it's quite likely to blow up spectacularly, particularly for desktop users.

It could be getting better now, as I haven't seen that many complaints in the last few years, but I'm still firmly in the camp of 'always do a fresh install with a new Ubuntu version.' I imagine I'll be doing that next month sometime, to upgrade my 22.04 NAS to 24.04.

malor said:

It could be getting better now, as I haven't seen that many complaints in the last few years, but I'm still firmly in the camp of 'always do a fresh install with a new Ubuntu version.' I imagine I'll be doing that next month sometime, to upgrade my 22.04 NAS to 24.04.

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Must admit I think when I do upgrades on desktops they do tend to be re-installs but on servers must have done more than 70 upgrades; never once had an issue, a mixture of cloud, VM and bare metal

Vince-RA said:

Anyone have experience with third party support for EOL operating systems like CentOS 6 or (soon) CentOS 7? Something like https://tuxcare.com/extended-lifecycle-support/centos-7-early-repo-access/

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Who is doing the backporting of these fixes? It looks like they have job openings for developers, so they are?

We have been dealing directly with RedHat and have enlisted their help assessing several servers running on legacy CentOS releases. I can report that they do have tools to convert CentOS7 to RHEL7 and recommend updating to RHEL 9. (Of course they do... ) I can also report that CentOS 6 doesn't have a direct upgrade path to a RHEL release and may have issues running Ansible, since it requires at least Python 2.7.