14 DAY TRIAL // The end of March 2017 concluded with the end of life for various GNU/Linux distributions based on the Red Hat's RHEL5 (Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5) series.
Red Hat published today, April 3, 2017, the final notification for the retirement of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 operating system, targeted at customers subscribed to the company's Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 channel. Users are being notified that Red Hat won't provide active support for RHEL5 starting March 31, 2017. However, Red Hat offers a special add-on for those who don't want to upgrade.
"To meet this customer requirement, Red Hat will offer customers the option to purchase the Extended Life Cycle Support (ELS) Add-On as an annually renewable subscription. This ELS Add-On provides customers with up to an additional three and a half (3.5) years of Critical Impact security fixes and selected Urgent Priority bug fixes for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.11," reads the security advisory.
CentOS Linux 5 and Scientific Linux 5 also reached their end of life
Pat Riehecky from Fermilab 5 also announced that the Scientific Linux 5 operating system series reached its end of life on March 31, 2017, which means that users running the OS on their infrastructures will no longer receive security updates. Fermilab does not provide extended life cycle support for Scientific Linux 5, so users are urged to upgrade their systems to the Scientific Linux 7 series.
In the same manner, CentOS' Johnny Hughes announced today, April 3, 2017, that the CentOS Linux 5 operating system series reached end of life. The CentOS team will no longer offer security updates for CentOS Linux 5 and don't recommend using the operating system for any purpose. Therefore, if you're still using CentOS 5, please upgrade to the latest CentOS Linux 7 series as soon as possible.