[j-nsp] Clarification of EOL policies

[Richard A Steenbergen]

On Mon, May 10, 2010 at 08:51:05AM +0000, Florian Weimer wrote:
> I'm a bit puzzled by the EOL policies.  According to
> <http://www.juniper.net/support/eol/junos.html>, JUNOS 8.5 has its
> first transition event on 2010-11-16 (whatever "End of Engineering"
> means).  Therefore, I assume that the level of available customer
> support is comparable to that of JUNOS 10.1 (with an event on
> 2010-11-15).  However, self-service downloads for JUNOS 8.5 have not
> been updated for years, despite intermediate security updates.  The
> situation for JUNOS 9.3 appears to be similar.

8.5 is an extended support release, so it has much longer support dates 
than normal images, but they never make anything other than R1 R2 R3 and 
R4 images available for download via the portal. You have to ask for a 
service release to get anything newer.

As far as the definitions go, End of Engineering means they won't do any
more work on that branch of code, and End of Support seems to mean they
won't even make the files available for download. The other month we hit
a nasty bug affecting 9.5R4 a few days after it was released, and were
told that they wouldn't fix it in any 9.5 branch because it had already
reached EoE (which happened before 9.5R4 was even released). 9.6 seems
to be in a similar state, it has already reached EoE (on May 6th) but
9.6R4 isn't even out yet. Also I'm not sure what the date on the latest 
8.5 service release is, but I don't think it's particularly current. 
8.5S4 was the last one I saw, and it was dated Nov 2009.

-- 
Richard A Steenbergen <ras at e-gerbil.net>       http://www.e-gerbil.net/ras
GPG Key ID: 0xF8B12CBC (7535 7F59 8204 ED1F CC1C 53AF 4C41 5ECA F8B1 2CBC)