Daemonic Dispatches

FreeBSD 5.3, 5.4, 6.0 EoLs

On October 31st, FreeBSD 5.3 and FreeBSD 5.4 will have reached their
End of Life and will no longer be supported by the FreeBSD Security
Team.  Users of either of those FreeBSD releases are strongly encouraged
to upgrade to FreeBSD 5.5 or FreeBSD 6.1 before that date.

In addition, the FreeBSD 6.0 End of Life is presently scheduled for
November 30th.  Depending upon the progress of the FreeBSD 6.2 release
cycle, this may be delayed until December 31st in order to allow time
for users of FreeBSD 6.0 to upgrade to FreeBSD 6.2.

Users of FreeBSD 4.11 systems are also reminded that that FreeBSD 4.11
will reach its End of Life at the end of January 2007 and that they
should be making plans to upgrade or replace such systems.

The current supported branches and expected EoL dates are:

   +--------------------------------------------------------------------+
   |  Branch   |  Release   |  Type  |  Release date  |  Estimated EoL  |
   |-----------+------------+--------+----------------+-----------------|
   |RELENG_4   |n/a         |n/a     |n/a             |January 31, 2007 |
   |-----------+------------+--------+----------------+-----------------|
   |RELENG_4_11|4.11-RELEASE|Extended|January 25, 2005|January 31, 2007 |
   |-----------+------------+--------+----------------+-----------------|
   |RELENG_5   |n/a         |n/a     |n/a             |May 31, 2008     |
   |-----------+------------+--------+----------------+-----------------|
   |RELENG_5_3 |5.3-RELEASE |Extended|November 6, 2004|October 31, 2006 |
   |-----------+------------+--------+----------------+-----------------|
   |RELENG_5_4 |5.4-RELEASE |Normal  |May 9, 2005     |October 31, 2006 |
   |-----------+------------+--------+----------------+-----------------|
   |RELENG_5_5 |5.5-RELEASE |Extended|May 25, 2006    |May 31, 2008     |
   |-----------+------------+--------+----------------+-----------------|
   |RELENG_6   |n/a         |n/a     |n/a             |last release + 2y|
   |-----------+------------+--------+----------------+-----------------|
   |RELENG_6_0 |6.0-RELEASE |Normal  |November 4, 2005|November 30, 2006|
   |-----------+------------+--------+----------------+-----------------|
   |RELENG_6_1 |6.1-RELEASE |Extended|May 9, 2006     |May 31, 2008     |
   +--------------------------------------------------------------------+

Once it is released, FreeBSD 6.2 will be supported until November 30, 
2007.

Of course, making life easy for the Security Team isn't worth much if everybody continues to run older releases. Here there is some good news from my Portsnap usage statistics: In the five months since FreeBSD 6.1 was released, the number of systems running portsnap on FreeBSD 6.0 has dropped by over 40%. I'm not optimistic enough to expect that the remaining 60% will all upgrade before FreeBSD 6.0 becomes unsupported, but it's a good start, and hopefully this latest reminder will help get us a bit closer to the goal of zero FreeBSD 6.0 users.