ClickCease Extended Lifecycle Support for Ubuntu 16.04 - TuxCare

High and Critical CVEs patched by TuxCare since EOL

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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 Advantage subscription plan will continue to receive updates for critical security risks.

Anyone using Ubuntu 16.04 without Ubuntu Advantage 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 Extended 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 Advantage 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.

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What is TuxCare’s Extended Lifecycle Support?

TuxCare provides extended security including ongoing patches and fixes that replace official vendor support. Called Extended 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. Extended 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 Advantage.

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 Advantage.

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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:

Rapid patching that responds quickly to new CVEs delivers extended security maintenance that covers your running Ubuntu 16.04 workloads against new threats
Benefit from the TuxCare’s team of experts, who has over a decade of experience securing Linux distributions, including Ubuntu.
Easy to get started and works just like patching from Canonical. Simply swap into place TuxCare’s ELS solution – and your patching resumes just like official support
The confidence that you can continue running Ubuntu 16.04 until you can migrate – and to do so safely.
Access to round-the-clock support, including technical account management.

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 Extended Lifecycle Support In just a few minutes you enjoy ongoing protection against the latest vulnerabilities.

Another option is to create a local mirror for Ubuntu 16.04 ELS patches, which you can do using rsync.

Supported components

TuxCare provides updates for the kernel, Apache, PHP, Glibc, OpenSSL, OpenSSH, and Python packages.
Packages updated includes

  • 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

… and many others.

Other major Enterprise Linux Distributions with TuxCare ELS

TuxCare’s Extended Lifecycle Support is also available for CentOS 8, Oracle Linux 6, and Ubuntu 16.04 LTS operating systems.

Extended Lifecycle Support for CentOS 8

End of life: December 2021

TuxCare will deliver Extended Lifecycle Support until January 2026, giving you enough time to switch your server fleet to an alternative distribution or upgrade to the newest version of your favorite Linux distributions.

Extended Lifecycle Support for Oracle Enterprise Linux 6

End of life: March 2021

Extended Lifecycle Support will last until December 2024. Save significantly on Oracle Linux’s Premier Support by choosing Extended Lifecycle Support for ongoing Oracle Linux 6 maintenance.

Extended Lifecycle Support for Ubuntu 16.04

End of life: April 2021

Save on an Ubuntu 16.04 subscription by choosing Extended Lifecycle Support for ongoing Ubuntu 16.04 maintenance, providing updates for your Ubuntu servers until April 2025.

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 Extended 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 extended 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 Extended 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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