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Comment by embolalia | Hacker News Reader

>CentOS4 legacy system

Jesus. That's been out of support for well over 2 years. I can't imagine this is the only problem it has. I'm curious: what's keeping the organization from upgrading it?

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Heh, you should see some of the systems that orgs I work with still have running. Just checked on one of my favorites:

  $ uptime
   07:26:20 up 3280 days, 16:23,  2 users,  load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00
  $ cat /etc/issue
  Debian GNU/Linux 3.1 \n \l

This one doesn't even have the excuse of running a piece of lab equipment (I saw such a system recently running Win95 without OSR1, so it doesn't even have USB support. They move data around with ZIP disks!).

Attached via the 25-pin parallel port, no doubt?

I've got to maintain a couple of RHEL4 servers that have simulation software running on them that has never been ported forward (education - the people who wrote it have long since left). Though we also still have a couple of DEC Alpha's kicking about attached to nanofabrication services. Fun times... Luckily I don't need to maintain all the win98 boxes we still have as well. Or the DOS ones.

Variety is the spice of life, and all that...

Well it was immune to heartbleed, lol

(ancient openssl never had tls heartbeat feature)

But Redhat actually still supports EL4 through their ELS program and releases patches for it until March 31, 2017

https://access.redhat.com/support/policy/updates/errata#th-r...

CentOS simply decided not to keep up with it anymore, cannot blame them.

Usually time and money.

That or it does something ridiculously specific with a rare feature that was removed and the people who built it have left.

You find a lot of that type in education/local government.

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