EL5 Security Policy For The Final 3 Years

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Red Hat‘s Security policy for Production 3 Phase of the Life Cycle for EL5 is that they will only release “Critical impact Security Advisories
(RHSAs) and selected Urgent Priority Bug Fix Advisories (RHBAs) may be released as they become available. Other errata advisories may be delivered as appropriate.”

https://access.redhat.com/support/policy/updates/errata/#Production_3_Phase

In practice, what that means so far is this:

All Important and Critical security updates have been released for EL5, but some moderate and below security updates have not been, and are not going to be released by Red Hat for EL5.

I do not agree with this policy, but it is not one that the CentOS
Project (or I) have any say about. These updates will not be released for RHEL-5 … therefore they will also not be released for CentOS-5.

Due to this security policy, I highly recommend moving CentOS-5 based workloads to CentOS-6 and that every user stop using CentOS-5 as soon as possible. Here is a list of updates that are not done on RHEL-5 and are not planned to be done at this time by Red Hat for RHEL-5 (and therefore CentOS-5):

I wish there was another option, but I just don’t see any others .. I
know I would not use packages with moderate security issues unfixed in production on purpose. I think this is a ridiculous policy, but it is what it is.

Thanks, Johnny Hughes

3 thoughts on - EL5 Security Policy For The Final 3 Years

  • This is essentially identical to the level of support you get if you pay for EUS (extended update support). And I guess the thinking is that that is a meaningful level of support to a significant number of customers…

    Personally I might had agreed if Important had been included but only Critical is too thin for many use cases.

    /Peter

  • Yes, the support policy for EUS is the same. You can find RH’s resoning here:

    https://access.redhat.com/articles/rhel-eus
    (scroll down to the comment section near the bottom)

    I agree. I think the problem is that most users are unaware of the facts. So, they assume their systems are safe security-wise as far as they get all the updates.

    Akemi