[ale] CentOS repositories question

[Beddingfield, Allen]

In our case, we have one application that has existed since the 80s, and apparently was last significantly updated in the late 90s/early 2000s when hitting a web interface and loading a huge and bloated Java application (which requires a specific version of Java) was more common.  It originated on AIX, then I get the feeling they got it working on Linux and didn’t want to touch it again.  They give a very specific set of instructions, with the exact disk layout they want, and they only support RHEL 5.6 currently. No patches, no firewall, and no tcp wrappers configured - starting to runlevel 5.  They also have a Windows version that they treat the same way - no patches, no firewall, etc…
I pointed out the stupidity of this, and the vendor’s response - to list off all of the government agencies and corporations using it without problem.  We have it firewall off, and the devices it controls on a private subnet - after I insisted.  The vendor just wanted to put it on a public IP.  They originally only supported RHEL 5.3 - then they sent over some bastardized upgrade procedure to update to 5.6.  Instead of just using yum to update it - they insisted on copying the DVD to the local drive, pointing yum there, and doing the update….heaven forbid it may actually pull in a patch.
The other one is a product that is about that old…it requires RHEL 6.1 exactly, and runs under Tomcat.  You can apply patches, but they don’t support patching the gcc compiler on it, and a few libraries.  It is like navigating a mine field to not accidentally update one of them as a dependency.

We have tested internally, and both applications work 100% on a fully patched system, but it is not a “supported config” by the lousy vendors.

Allen B. 
--
Allen Beddingfield
Systems Engineer
The University of Alabama









On 5/11/15, 10:02 PM, "Jeff Hubbs" <jhubbslist at att.net> wrote:

>
>Which in my view was a state of affairs common in the 1980s and 1990s 
>that we sought refuge from with Linux and other Open Source software.  I 
>got tired of being painted into platform corners with this or that piece 
>of software; it's a shame people have let themselves get right back into 
>that regime again.
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