[CentOS] RHEL Subscriptions

[Barry Brimer]

> I was recently approached by Dell stating that I HAVE TO renew my Red
> Hat Subscriptions.  I challenged this statement and was informed that
> this has always been the case and that all servers I have bought off of
> Dell over the years need to have current subscription!

If you bought a 1 year RHEL subscription with your Dell server (or any 
other server) on 1/1/2012 it would expire on 1/1/2013.  At this point, you 
are entitled to keep all software and updates that you have on this server 
at this time and you are no longer entitled to ongoing software updates or 
support.  A more interesting way to illustrate this is what happens when 
Red Hat drops support for a particular release.  If you had 20 RHEL 
subscriptions which were 10 RHEL 4 and 10 RHEL 5 on the day that Red Hat 
stopped supporting RHEL 4, you would be entitled to reuse those 10 
subscriptions that were on RHEL 4 machines, whether on new hardware or to 
rebuild the existing machines because there are no longer updates (yes, I 
am aware of ELS) available.  If you called Red Hat support about your RHEL 
4 machine you wouldn't receive support either.  So, you could then reuse 
your subscriptions on newer versions of RHEL while keeping your old 
systems running but without updates or support.

Hope this helps.
Barry