On 7 February 2014 09:19, Paul Wouters <paul@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
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Taking out everyone who tries to run fedora or rhel7 using a physical
cirrus card IMHO is just sloppy and lazy. Yes, people still run P-III
servers with SCSI disks and cirrus cards. In fact, I think you will
see it more within the enterprise then outside it.
Not really. The enterprise side usually sticks to a maximum 5 year warranty cycle for hardware because it works better from everything from insurance, PCI certs, and taxes and other filings.. If they have old stuff it is running software which can't be run on anything but the OS it has currently. So your old P-III box is going to be running RHEL-2.1/RHL-7.3 because whatever business app it has only runs or is only supported on that.
Businesses that are relying on very old hardware tend to fall into three camps.
1) They are big budget places that can pay Dell, HP, IBM more money in yearly warranty costs than a new server would cost.
2) Small places where they are getting by day by day and have better things to do than pay for an Enterprise OS because they would like to pay themselves.
3) Individual consultants who love to keep old stuff around because they never know when they might need it (usually at 4 am when some new client calls and says "We found that our accounting system relies on this old Gateway computer with some sort of thick cables sticking out of it to something making a lot of metalic noise at the moment."
Number 1 will pay Red Hat, SUSE, Dell, IBM etc to support Red Hat Enterprise 2.1 til the heat death of the universe (ie they go bankrupt the next fiscal crisis).
Number 2 will use whatever was on the box until they can't get parts for it...
Number 3 won't want to put something new on it because if they need to support Red Hat Linux 4.2, they will need a working copy of it on the hardware of the time. [If they do it is to prove to their customer that putting RHEL-7 on a 10 year old computer is a bad idea and then bill them for the replacement computer.]
Only two of those camps will pay for licenses (the consultants will do so as they need it and as long as they have a customer they can bill it to). None of those camps will want to put a new enterprise OS on old hardware.
Now for the non enterprise market, there are many different areas that will want to put new software on old hardware. However they either can do it themselves and work through various problems, or they see it is going to cost them more time than it is worth and go back to old stuff.
Stephen J Smoogen.
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