[j-nsp] Clarification of EOL policies

[Florian Weimer]

* 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.

We did that, but it seems that the later 8.5S releases for J-series
have been pulled since the last round of security fixes.  That's why
the download URLs we initially received don't work (we suspected a
permission issue, but it's not).

> 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.

Based on that, I assumed that 8.5 would still receive security fixes.
This does not seem to be the case.  Looks like we have to upgrade to a
9.3S release (still not flow-based, so it's got a chance of working).

I really hope that all this is J-series specific (or just bad luck on
our part).  It's scary to think that backbone operators have to jump
through similar hoops to get security fixes for their routers.

-- 
Florian Weimer                <fweimer at bfk.de>
BFK edv-consulting GmbH       http://www.bfk.de/
Kriegsstraße 100              tel: +49-721-96201-1
D-76133 Karlsruhe             fax: +49-721-96201-99