You already know your answer: Every one of our SunE10K's, E6500's, and i think now our E4900's are EOL, according to Sun :), but we keep them running ship-shape(updates et all) and they have paid for themselves over n over again.
However, we have a (mirrored) Development department that tests these things (as carefully as we can), before major upgrades/OS updates. I hear ya, Murphy's Law, but also and even more so these days, If your Pruduction dept. is that important then so should your Development dept. be -without which Production will not absorb future changes reliably. All this depends on what you're using your present servers for?. Ours were heavily transaction/oracle based, along with our FreeBSD apache web server farms'... so I'm sorry if this doesn't giude/or match you much. For example, we still "only" use our OpenBSD vpn/firewall server, its now 6 years old and other than 6 reboots (2 due to 2 elect.outages) it simply worked fine, our network admin finally upgraded it, and performance-wise its much better. Yes, this was situational, but it worked like a charm. This was after we used a $600 (used) Dell-x86-arch system to test it prior (at 4:00AM u know what I mean). There were of course, a couple problems unfortunately to our customers' chagrin, but we didn't lose those cutomers and the benefits now were well worth it. But yes, I aggree with you, EOL means nuthin' (why?, just beacuse some manufacturer' wants you to spend more money?)-however, "support" means everything (be it HW/SW) that we all know. It's oviously a sutuational (money-dependent) judgement call. You can wait 'till you "need" to change/upgrade/update which may be a very fatal gamble?, OR, You test it before. I'd rather have some kind of dev/testing than the alternative. -be it whatever? cheers. Rick. > Date: Mon, 4 May 2009 17:58:22 -0700 > From: [email protected] > To: [email protected] > Subject: End of Life is Meaningless > > That should be read as "End of Life" is meaningless. Not end of "Life > is Meaningless." Life is still meaningless, as is this post if you > disagree. > > It mystifies me that there is this recent tendency for people to get > concerned about EOL. "What do I do?" My answer, "Do nothing." Just > because a FreeBSD version is EOL doesn't mean you have to stop using > it. It doesn't mean that your particular version is suddenly prone to > downtime. It doesn't mean you can't install patches even though the > secteam won't be updating CVS. It doesn't mean you can't continue to > develop applications for a major version. > > EOL is a tool for FreeBSD to manage its own house. It is in no way a > directive on how you should manage your house. Queue someone still > running 2.1.5 with uptime stats. Come on. You know you want to show off. > > To the people who have to manage limited resources and must therefore > implement an EOL policy. I commend you on the balancing act. Good on ya > mates. Your doing a fine job. > > Regards, > Jason > _______________________________________________ > [email protected] mailing list > http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-chat > To unsubscribe, send any mail to "[email protected]" _________________________________________________________________ Create a cool, new character for your Windows Live™ Messenger. http://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=9656621_______________________________________________ [email protected] mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-chat To unsubscribe, send any mail to "[email protected]"
