>From that link it shows that RedHat's support position boils down to 3
years of helping people migrate TO a particular release and 4 years of
migrating FROM that release.  Basically, after 3 years, they won't
officially help you deploy a new system on that release.

Same with Symantec.  New deployments of the latest NetBackup Server on
a 3 year old RedHat release don't make a lot of sense.  I'm sure the
client will still work and if it doesn't you can run the older client
and still get support.

Regardless of the official position now, there are a ton of people
using RHEL 3, just like Solaris 8.  Both face the same issue in the
next major NetBackup release.

Austin


On 5/11/06, Rob Worman <rob AT worman DOT org> wrote:
> FYI on this topic of NBU support and RedHat 3 in particular...
>
> Ed, you wrote that:
>
> <snip>
> > Fact:  NetBackup 6.5, targeted for release in February, 2007, will drop
> > support for RHEL 3.  RHEL 3 started shipping in October, 2003 and will
> > be supported by Red Hat through October, 2010.  Symantec will cut you
> > off with its current release nearly 4 years before Red Hat stops
> > supporting the OS.  On the other hand, Windows 2000, which was released
> > 2 1/2 years earlier than RHEL 3, will still be supported by NetBackup
> > 6.5.
> </snip>
>
> I must respectfully disagree with this "Fact:".
>
> The relevant Symantec publication on this topic seems to be p.3-4 of
> the NetBackup 6 OS Supportability Matrix, found here:
>
> http://ftp.support.veritas.com/pub/support/products/NetBackup_Enterprise_Server/278064.pdf
>
> In particular, references to RH 3 include a footnote that reads,
>
>   "Next major release following NetBackup 6.0
>    will not support this OS Version.  This status
>    could change if market and/or vendor support
>    positions change."
>
> For the past 8 years that I've been using NBU and reading these
> supportability statements, the phrase "next major release" has
> consistently referred to the next major version number.
> i.e., NetBackup 7.0 (or NBU 8, or NBU 2008, or whatever TPTB
> decide to call it).
>
> So I'm quite confident that these questions don't apply to 6.5.
>
> In my experience, NBU has been good about fully supporting an
> OS revision for AT LEAST as long as the OS vendor is still
> providing general fixes for that version.  For RH3, I think that
> will be true until November of this year.  Reference:
>
> http://www.redhat.com/security/updates/errata/
>
> HTH
> rob
>
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