[j-nsp] Clarification of EOL policies

[Barry Greene]

On 5/10/10 12:32 PM, "Richard A Steenbergen" <ras at e-gerbil.net> wrote:

> 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.

Here is a standard verbiage:

-------
How to obtain Service Releases:

Security vulnerabilities are fixed in the next available Maintenance Release
of  each supported JUNOS version.  In some cases, a Maintenance Release is
not planned to be available in an appropriate time-frame.  For these cases,
Service Releases are made available in order to be more  timely. Security
Advisory notices will indicate which Maintenance and/or Service Releases
contain fixes for the issues described. Upon request to JTAC, customers will
be provided  download instructions for a Service Release.  Although Juniper
does not provide formal Release Note documentation for a Service Release, a 
list of "PRs fixed" can be provided on request.
-------

So the short answer is to open a JTAC Case if you need a service release.

The latest 8.5 service release is 8.5S8 - only built for the core products
(not for J-Series). Open a JTAC case if you need a 8.5S8 built for J-Series.


Barry