From owner-freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG Thu Oct 19 23:51:14 2006 Return-Path: X-Original-To: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org Delivered-To: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 3CCCF16A403; Thu, 19 Oct 2006 23:51:14 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from rwatson@FreeBSD.org) Received: from cyrus.watson.org (cyrus.watson.org [209.31.154.42]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id E7CCF43D46; Thu, 19 Oct 2006 23:51:13 +0000 (GMT) (envelope-from rwatson@FreeBSD.org) Received: from fledge.watson.org (fledge.watson.org [209.31.154.41]) by cyrus.watson.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 2B1C246E17; Thu, 19 Oct 2006 19:51:13 -0400 (EDT) Date: Fri, 20 Oct 2006 00:51:13 +0100 (BST) From: Robert Watson X-X-Sender: robert@fledge.watson.org To: security In-Reply-To: <45355C6E.5030703@jim-liesl.org> Message-ID: <20061020004915.V32598@fledge.watson.org> References: <453531C9.7080304@freebsd.org> <45355C6E.5030703@jim-liesl.org> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII; format=flowed Cc: freebsd-security@freebsd.org, freebsd-stable@freebsd.org Subject: Re: FreeBSD 4.x EoL X-BeenThere: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.5 Precedence: list List-Id: Production branch of FreeBSD source code List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Thu, 19 Oct 2006 23:51:14 -0000 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