Chris's Wiki :: blog/sysadmin/SometimesOldBinaries

Something that is probably not news to system administrators who've been doing this long enough is that sometimes, you need to or have to run old binaries of programs. I don't mean that you need to run old versions of things (although since the program binaries are old, they will be old versions); I mean that you literally need to run old binaries, ones that were built years ago.

The obvious situation where this can happen is if you have commercial software and the vendor either goes out of business or stops providing updates for the software. In some situations this can result in you needing to keep extremely old systems alive simply to run this old software, and there are lots of stories about 'business critical' software in this situation.

(One possibly apocryphal local story is that the central IT people had to keep a SPARC Solaris machine running for more than a decade past its feasible end of life because it was the only environment that ran a very special printer driver that was used to print payroll checks.)

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