[ale] CentOS repositories question

[Jim Kinney]

Blargh! Lousy vendor. But their investors are happy and _that's_ what
matters.

Me being the a$$hole I am, I would slap their crap in a vm on their
supported versions of everything for their "support" and run the live stuff
on the most current, locked down system outside of the 3 letter agencies.
If there's a problem, verify it on the crap platform and yell for a
solution.

There's tons of code that was written for specific hardware cases that
can't be updated (mostly winders but I've seen some Linux as well). The
only solution is to wall it off and setup deep packet inspection on the
data stream associated with it. Or sneakernet it.
On May 12, 2015 9:12 AM, "Beddingfield, Allen" <allen at ua.edu> wrote:

> 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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