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SUSE has offered some level of support for RHEL/CentOS for a long time. They’ve had various programs over the years, long before this, to support customers who

by jzb 3y ago

SUSE has offered some level of support for RHEL/CentOS for a long time. They’ve had various programs over the years, long before this, to support customers who are on RHEL but might migrate to SLES. The specific SKUs and details change from time to time, but it’s not really a new thing. As a trailing competitor, it’s a reasonable thing to do.

_4ta5 3y ago
Oh man does SUSE(often via Microsoft referrals) provide support for a lot of Linux distros. If you are willing, they'll pretty much support any reasonable distro. Ages ago at a large managed hosting company we had 10s of 10000s of RHEL licenses but we also had a lot of people using CentOS for various reasons. Long story short, since CentOS only supported the current point release at the time we had a lot of boxes out there that needed critical patches. SUSE provided us with CVE fixes for any CentOS release we wanted to support and we were able to distribute them via our internal RHN system to CentOS machines. It made the auditors happy.
- galangalalgol 3y ago
  That is amazing, especially as RHEL has a critical CVE sitting there for months that will never be backported to 8, while plenty of enterprises are sitting on 7.9 still. The auditors being happy is important, but part of what people pay for with RHEL is liability, and I can't imagine you get that with third party support.
  - throwawayExSUSE 3y ago
    The product was called "expanded support" before. It was used to buy companies out of their RHEL contract before the renewal date, and ship SLES for new deployments. Nothing new.
    - chadcatlett 3y ago
      Ahh yes, there was that kind of thing as well. SUSE provided us with ways of replacing all packages on a RHEL running system with SUSE augmented CentOS packages. It was often used by people who wanted a cheaper alternative to RHEL, but still wanted CentOS for their random 3rd party apps.
  - tripflag 3y ago
    Curious, what CVE is this? I thought that even CentOS 7.x was still under support, so not patching vulnerabilities sounds like a great way to lose even more (would-be) customers.
    - galangalalgol 3y ago
      It looks like they finished fixing it last week and it looks like it was only a high. When I first ran into it in audit reports python said it wasn't a defect in python, just how it was used, but they would change it in 3.11.4 but no official backports. The bugzilla issue for 7 and 8 said they couldn't fix it without breaking things, so they wouldn't. It seems they found a way. https://access.redhat.com/security/cve/cve-2023-24329 https://access.redhat.com/security/cve/cve-2023-24329
  - worthless-trash 3y ago
    Citation ? as Criticals are -definitely- still in el7 lifecycle support.
    - galangalalgol 3y ago
      Repeating from sibling post to make sure I'm not leaving any misinformation spread. It looks like they finished fixing it last week and it looks like it was only a high. When I first ran into it in audit reports python said it wasn't a defect in python, just how it was used, but they would change it in 3.11.4 but no official backports. The bugzilla issue for 7 and 8 said they couldn't fix it without breaking things, so they wouldn't. It seems they found a way. https://access.redhat.com/security/cve/cve-2023-24329 https://access.redhat.com/security/cve/cve-2023-24329
mseidl 3y ago
I've been working on SUSE Manager and we offer support with RHEL clients and all the clones like CENTOS and others. We actually are cheaper for rhel licenses. (you don't' get the same support ilke redhat but if you just wanted updates we can do it. )
- jkaplowitz 3y ago
  Cheaper for RHEL licenses (with reduced scope of support) than Red Hat themselves, meaning SUSE is a RHEL license reseller approved by Red Hat?
- stracer 3y ago
  This sounds interesting. Does that mean that if Rocky Linux and Almalinux die now, I can start paying you to provide security updates for my Rocky Linux 9 servers for 10 years?

by jzb 3y ago

_4ta5 3y ago

Oh man does SUSE(often via Microsoft referrals) provide support for a lot of Linux distros. If you are willing, they'll pretty much support any reasonable distro. Ages ago at a large managed hosting company we had 10s of 10000s of RHEL licenses but we also had a lot of people using CentOS for various reasons. Long story short, since CentOS only supported the current point release at the time we had a lot of boxes out there that needed critical patches. SUSE provided us with CVE fixes for any CentOS release we wanted to support and we were able to distribute them via our internal RHN system to CentOS machines. It made the auditors happy.

galangalalgol 3y ago
That is amazing, especially as RHEL has a critical CVE sitting there for months that will never be backported to 8, while plenty of enterprises are sitting on 7.9 still. The auditors being happy is important, but part of what people pay for with RHEL is liability, and I can't imagine you get that with third party support.
- throwawayExSUSE 3y ago
  The product was called "expanded support" before. It was used to buy companies out of their RHEL contract before the renewal date, and ship SLES for new deployments. Nothing new.
  - chadcatlett 3y ago
    Ahh yes, there was that kind of thing as well. SUSE provided us with ways of replacing all packages on a RHEL running system with SUSE augmented CentOS packages. It was often used by people who wanted a cheaper alternative to RHEL, but still wanted CentOS for their random 3rd party apps.
- tripflag 3y ago
  Curious, what CVE is this? I thought that even CentOS 7.x was still under support, so not patching vulnerabilities sounds like a great way to lose even more (would-be) customers.
  - galangalalgol 3y ago
    It looks like they finished fixing it last week and it looks like it was only a high. When I first ran into it in audit reports python said it wasn't a defect in python, just how it was used, but they would change it in 3.11.4 but no official backports. The bugzilla issue for 7 and 8 said they couldn't fix it without breaking things, so they wouldn't. It seems they found a way. https://access.redhat.com/security/cve/cve-2023-24329 https://access.redhat.com/security/cve/cve-2023-24329
- worthless-trash 3y ago
  Citation ? as Criticals are -definitely- still in el7 lifecycle support.
  - galangalalgol 3y ago
    Repeating from sibling post to make sure I'm not leaving any misinformation spread. It looks like they finished fixing it last week and it looks like it was only a high. When I first ran into it in audit reports python said it wasn't a defect in python, just how it was used, but they would change it in 3.11.4 but no official backports. The bugzilla issue for 7 and 8 said they couldn't fix it without breaking things, so they wouldn't. It seems they found a way. https://access.redhat.com/security/cve/cve-2023-24329 https://access.redhat.com/security/cve/cve-2023-24329

mseidl 3y ago

I've been working on SUSE Manager and we offer support with RHEL clients and all the clones like CENTOS and others. We actually are cheaper for rhel licenses. (you don't' get the same support ilke redhat but if you just wanted updates we can do it. )

jkaplowitz 3y ago
Cheaper for RHEL licenses (with reduced scope of support) than Red Hat themselves, meaning SUSE is a RHEL license reseller approved by Red Hat?
stracer 3y ago
This sounds interesting. Does that mean that if Rocky Linux and Almalinux die now, I can start paying you to provide security updates for my Rocky Linux 9 servers for 10 years?