Hi,

I don't want to change to freeBSD or RH Enterprise.

Can I stick with RH 9.0 for 5 - 10 years? What problem may I have if I stick with RH 9.0?

Best regards

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ex5316

I doubt patches (or maybe even advisories) will come out for even 5 years. You'll probably be OK with it for a few years, but certainly not that long.

I believe you could. Most of the components within RH9 are actually 3rd party open source components which you could patch individually. However, the beauty about the up2date function is that it does all that work for you.

If the Fedora project will persists, they will provide the necessary ability to patch your RH9. 3rd party company such as Progeny is planning to support RH 7 to RH 9 through their update http://www.progeny.com/products/transition/index.html . I believe that there would probably be others that would do that in the near future. There are just too much RH 7 to RH 9 based systems right now. Any transition from RH 9 to RH Enterprise is not going to be as problem-free and painless. So I am sure that many will stay with what they have. Downtime for most is not an option.

RH Enterprise isn't what I would classify as GPL or cheap and to use it over say a 3 year timeframe (as such the life of Windows), it can actually be equal or more expensive as a Windows server license over that same time frame.

Probably I could see someone using RH 9 over a 3 to 5 years time frame but beyond, it is hard to tell.

regardless of the OS, are you going to be hosting on the same hardware in 5-10 years? ;)

If it works and serve its purpose, why not ? ;)

But of course, hardwares were never made to last that long so I am giving it a 3 to 5 years time frame. I am sure that the current system as a whole can last that long.

Upgrading now may be a risk which is not worth taking because you do not know what will work and what wouldn't in the new OS. In short, compatibility issues.

Hrm.. keeping the same OS for awhile..

Think about how long Windows XP has been out, 2 years thus far. Time sneaks away doesn't it? :D

I don't see any reason to move from Redhat if you can get support/updates for it from a reliable source.

As for migrating from Redhat to RHEL, why? If Redhat did this, what is next?

Yay Debian GNU/Linux! :D

Try http://www.whiteboxlinux.org.
This is Redhat ES but w/o the corporate logo's, etc.