ClickCease Extended Lifecycle Support for Ubuntu 16.04 - TuxCare

High and Critical CVEs patched by
TuxCare since EOL

4786

Ubuntu release 16.04 LTS Xenial Xerus enjoyed free updates and support through to April 30, 2021, when Ubuntu security maintenance stopped. Only users that subscribe to an expensive Ubuntu Pro subscription plan will continue to receive updates for critical security risks.

Anyone using Ubuntu 16.04 without Ubuntu Pro security maintenance needs to act fast because unsupported Ubuntu 16.04 machines are now increasingly vulnerable to a range of security challenges. You can migrate to a new version of Ubuntu or another Linux distribution, but migration requires planning and takes time.

Don’t leave your running Ubuntu 16.04 workloads vulnerable while you plan to migrate.
Consider activating TuxCare’s Endless Lifecycle Service (ELS) right now.

What does End of Life
(EOL) mean?

When an operating system is end of life it means that the vendor no longer officially supports it. There are therefore no new updates if a bug or security vulnerability is found.

Ubuntu release 16.04 is now at the point in the release cycle where it is officially end of life. Canonical does offer an Ubuntu Pro subscription for LTS Xenial Xerus as an alternative for ongoing support, but at a significant cost.

Organizations that are running Ubuntu 16.04 must migrate immediately or sign up for an extended support plan to guard against vulnerabilities.

The risks of running
EOL Ubuntu

Every year new vulnerabilities are found in the Linux kernel and components of the Linux OS, affecting the many Linux distributions too – including Ubuntu.

If a distribution is no longer supported, patches won’t appear – and the OS becomes at greater risk of cyberattack. Anything from ransomware through to crypto miners can find a way in, with devastating consequences.

On the other hand, rapidly migrating to a supported Ubuntu release without thoroughly testing your workloads can involve a lot of risk and migration is something to approach carefully.

What is TuxCare’s Endless Lifecycle Support?

TuxCare provides extended security including ongoing patches and fixes that replace official vendor support. Called Endless Lifecycle Support, it covers Ubuntu LTS release 16.04 for the same patches and fixes you’d receive from Canonical.

With TuxCare you can secure Ubuntu Xenial Xerus past the official end of life date. Endless Lifecycle Support is available as a standalone service that helps protect your workloads against critical security risks, at just $4.25 per machine per month. That is significantly less than Ubuntu’s extended support alternative – Ubuntu Pro.

In other words, you can get vendor-grade fixes and patches that match what you received while Ubuntu 16.04 was officially supported – and that will protect you against security threats just as well as Ubuntu Pro.

Act now to protect your Ubuntu 16.04 servers and get additional time to migrate to Ubuntu 20.04 or your preferred distribution. With TuxCare, you get:

Responsive patching that delivers a vendor-quality patch whenever a new high or critical CVE is reported that affects Ubuntu 16.04.

Benefit from the team of experts at TuxCare who has more than ten years of in-depth development experience across Linux distributions such as RHEL, CentOS, Ubuntu, and Oracle Linux

Setting up TuxCare for your Ubuntu 16.04 machines is easy. Patching works the same way it did when Canonical still offered free support for Ubuntu 16.04, with seamless patch flows.

Buy time to migrate your webservers confidently and other workloads to newer, supported enterprise Linux operating systems such as Ubuntu 22.04, thanks to TuxCare security updates.

Enjoy technical account management and 24/7 support through the TuxCare ticketing system.

One simple step to extending
Ubuntu 16.04 support

Moving your Ubuntu 16.04 workloads to a patched and secured state is easy. It just takes a
single script to activate extended lifecycle support for Ubuntu.

Thanks to TuxCare's Endless Lifecycle Support, in just a few minutes you'll enjoy ongoing
protection against the latest vulnerabilities.

Components covered by
TuxCare ELS

TuxCare provides updates for the kernel, Apache, PHP, glibc, OpenSSL, OpenSSH, and Python packages.

ELS also updates packages including →

  • acpid
  • glibc
  • attr
  • php
  • info
  • Iptstate
  • gdb
  • glib2
  • bash
  • basesystem
  • authconfig
  • zlib
  • acl
  • dovecot
  • mysql
  • ed
  • gcc
  • lslk
  • blktrace
  • bc
  • openssh
  • device-mapper
  • dhclient
  • dhcpv6
  • dmidecode
  • bzip2
  • busybox
  • bridge-utils
  • httpd
  • userspace
  • packages
  • crash
  • cyrus-imapd
  • cyrus-sasl

Every major end-of-life enterprise Linux
distribution is covered by TuxCare's ELS

TuxCare’s Endless Lifecycle Support is also available for other operating systems, including:

Frequently Asked Questions

Ubuntu LTS releases have fixed support windows. For Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, hardware and maintenance updates from Canonical ceased on April 31, 2021 when it reached end of life. This means that Ubuntu 16.04 users no longer receive security patches for critical security vulnerabilities unless users subscribe to Ubuntu Advantage, but that comes at a substantial cost.

Users of Ubuntu 16.04 Xenial Xerus need to migrate to Ubuntu release 18.04 LTS or another distribution as soon as possible. However, in the meantime, TuxCare’s Endless Lifecycle Support for Ubuntu 16.04 can continue to protect your Ubuntu 16.04 workloads with security patches.

Servers using Ubuntu 16.04 will continue to work, but the Linux kernel will be vulnerable to threats that emerged since April 2021 because there are no ongoing security updates. With no vendor security updates forthcoming, it’s critical that Ubuntu 16.04 users find a way to close vulnerabilities.

Ubuntu Advantage is one option, but the costs are significant. TuxCare’s endless lifecycle support is a more affordable alternative: at just $4.50 per machine, you can start protecting your Ubuntu 16.04 workloads right now.

You can continue to rely on standard support for your Ubuntu 18.04 LTS workloads right through to April 2023. That said, end of life for Ubuntu 18.04 LTS is also around the corner, so you need to consider an upgrade to Ubuntu 20.04 LTS before April 2023 to avoid ending up in a disaster recovery situation.

If you’re unable to execute an Ubuntu 20.04 migration strategy in time you can consider signing up to TuxCare’s Endless Lifecycle Support for Ubuntu 18.04 once it becomes available.

Note that Ubuntu 21.04 (Hirsute Hippo) is not a feasible alternative to migrate to as it is not one of the Ubuntu LTS versions. Hirsute Hippo is one of the interim releases with just nine months of support, while an Ubuntu LTS release enjoys five years.

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