1 Topic by ZhangHuangbin

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Topic: Should we drop RHEL/CentOS 6 support for NEW iRedMail installation?

Dear all,

I’d like to hear from you: should we drop RHEL/CentOS 6 support for NEW iRedMail installation?

Reasons we want to drop CentOS 6 in upcoming iRedMail release (0.9.8):

RHEL/CentOS 6 is too old.

- RHEL 6 is 7 years old (released on Nov 10, 2010), even RHEL 7 is 3 years old (released on June 10, 2014).
- RHEL/CentOS 6 is still widely used, but it’s not a good choice for NEW mail server.

RHEL/CentOS 6 ships php-5.3 - it's end of life.

PHP-5.3 is end of life on Jan 1, 2014, no more security fixes for 5.3.
FYI: http://php.net/supported-versions.php

Note: CentOS 7 ships PHP-5.4, it’s end of life too.

More iRedMail admins chose CentOS 7.

For iRedMail-0.9.7, we have 5152 CentOS-7 installations, but 2264 CentOS-6 installations. The number is clear.

Comments?

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2 Reply by nazar-pc

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Re: Should we drop RHEL/CentOS 6 support for NEW iRedMail installation?

Not using CentOS at all, but I'd be fine with dropping support for 7 years old OS in new installations.

3 Reply by chaochao

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Re: Should we drop RHEL/CentOS 6 support for NEW iRedMail installation?

好多人不习惯centos7的新命令啊,还停留在centos6

4 Reply by ZhangHuangbin

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Re: Should we drop RHEL/CentOS 6 support for NEW iRedMail installation?

chaochao wrote:

好多人不习惯centos7的新命令啊,还停留在centos6

不要活在旧世界。:)

5 Reply by host2904

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Re: Should we drop RHEL/CentOS 6 support for NEW iRedMail installation?

Dropping it for _new_ installs is ok for me.

I expect some of us are using alternate repos that provide php 7 support.

6 Reply by romanmm

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Re: Should we drop RHEL/CentOS 6 support for NEW iRedMail installation?

I'm still using CentOS6.9. I think everyone that wants security on his server must migrate to CentOS7. I'm planning to migrate a lot of time but as usual we have no time to do such things and if you can help with step-by-step instructions how to migrate IRM itself it will push people to migrate asap.

7 Reply by ZhangHuangbin

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Re: Should we drop RHEL/CentOS 6 support for NEW iRedMail installation?

romanmm wrote:

I'm still using CentOS6.9. I think everyone that wants security on his server must migrate to CentOS7. I'm planning to migrate a lot of time but as usual we have no time to do such things and if you can help with step-by-step instructions how to migrate IRM itself it will push people to migrate asap.

FYI: https://docs.iredmail.org/migrate.to.ne … erver.html

8 Reply by toastbrot

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Re: Should we drop RHEL/CentOS 6 support for NEW iRedMail installation?

i would drop support for unsupported os/dependencies at least 1year after the last security fix... otherwise you have to bother about insecure setups and provide hacks/quirks to keep old stuff running. the security world is turning faster than ever, so we constantly have to keep on patching/migrating anyway.

9 Reply by kmihalj (edited by kmihalj 2017-12-05 16:14:06)

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Re: Should we drop RHEL/CentOS 6 support for NEW iRedMail installation?

I'm fine with droping support for new instalations. I used CentOS 6 before, migrated to CentOS 7 a year ago.

kmihalj's Website

10 Reply by iperkins

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Re: Should we drop RHEL/CentOS 6 support for NEW iRedMail installation?

This is common sense, I support the decision to drop Centos 6 for new installs.

11 Reply by jorge

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Re: Should we drop RHEL/CentOS 6 support for NEW iRedMail installation?

Hi, Zang.

When do you think to release version 0.9.8?

12 Reply by ZhangHuangbin

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Re: Should we drop RHEL/CentOS 6 support for NEW iRedMail installation?

jorge wrote:

When do you think to release version 0.9.8?

Still a lot work to do to integrate mlmmj, i hope we can get a beta release in 1 month.

13 Reply by schnappi (edited by schnappi 2017-12-15 07:36:08)

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Re: Should we drop RHEL/CentOS 6 support for NEW iRedMail installation?

Would say yes as to dropping RHEL/ CentOS 6 support. In same spirit of dropping Apache no reason to do so much work ensuring compatibility when could be directing effort on the core of iRedMail. Think most are probably using Debian or a Debian derivative too.

14 Reply by iredmailtnt

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Re: Should we drop RHEL/CentOS 6 support for NEW iRedMail installation?

It probably makes sense to drop support for new installations of RHEL/Centos6. EOL for Standard support is still almost 3 years away ( November 30, 2020) but I would expect anyone wanting to build a mail server would want to get more than 3 years out of it.

As for php shipped with both RHEL 6 and 7, Red Hat will provide security fixes for the life of any of their supported systems. For anyone not familiar with the RHEL/Centos lifecycle see https://access.redhat.com/support/policy/updates/errata for RHEL and
https://wiki.centos.org/FAQ/General#hea … dde5b75e6d for the Centos lifecycle info.

Is the old php support really becoming a problem? If it is, have you considered using the SCL's or the Remi repos?

15 Reply by ZhangHuangbin

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Re: Should we drop RHEL/CentOS 6 support for NEW iRedMail installation?

iredmailtnt wrote:

Is the old php support really becoming a problem? If it is, have you considered using the SCL's or the Remi repos?

For iRedMail itself, not a problem. But for PHP applications like Roundcube, PHP-5.3 is not supported by the latest Roundcube  (1.3.3) anymore.

16 Reply by xgathos

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Re: Should we drop RHEL/CentOS 6 support for NEW iRedMail installation?

my wish: drop CentOS6 but add Amazon Linux :-)

17 Reply by ZhangHuangbin

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Re: Should we drop RHEL/CentOS 6 support for NEW iRedMail installation?

xgathos wrote:

my wish: drop CentOS6 but add Amazon Linux :-)

Still no plan for Amazon Linux yet. Will try docker first in few months.

18 Reply by selea

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Re: Should we drop RHEL/CentOS 6 support for NEW iRedMail installation?

It sounds like a logical decision to drop the CentOS 6 support. Even if it has a couple of years of maintenance support left - dropping it for new installations is a good choice