Questions[end-of-life](server)

We are working on a software solution and some of our providers are really CentOS 7 centered.

CentoS 7 will continue to produce through the remainder of the RHEL 7 life cycle, which will end sometime in 2024.

CentOS 8 will receive updates till December 2021.

CentOS Stream was announced by Red Hat but is apparently not a replacement for CentOS.

I am not very into diving in this if options are uncertain in the near future with CentOS.

Question: what are the options for CentOS 7 users when RHEL 7 reach its end of life and users need a production ready server?

I understand that Adobe Flash is reaching it's end of life by the end of 2020 with all browsers blocking it etc. Microsoft also says that

Microsoft will also take steps to remove Flash from the Windows operating system

But my concern is not flash content in browsers. I have to deal with standalone flash applications - mostly educational applications - bought on DVD and installed. I'm unsure on how these application work technically:

• do they somehow use IE internally? (that would mean they would become unusable after the Windows update)
• do they have some kind of flash player packaged into the exe and the 2021 win update wont affect them?
• how to find out?

Basically my question is: how to find out if an application which uses a form of adobe flash will be working after the mentioned windows update?

Thanks!

Note: I don't want to go for any workarounds / disabling windows updates etc.

I have a website actually hosted on an Ubuntu 18.10 and I can't install anything. At first everything was working (a few weeks ago when I fist spawned this VPS) but now I always get error

me@cdad:/etc/php/7.2/mods-available$ sudo apt-get install php7.2-mbstring
...
Ign:1 http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu cosmic-updates/universe amd64 php7.2-mbstring amd64 7.2.19-0ubuntu0.18.10.1
Err:1 http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu cosmic-updates/universe amd64 php7.2-mbstring amd64 7.2.19-0ubuntu0.18.10.1
  404  Not Found [IP: 91.189.91.38 80]
E: Failed to fetch http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/universe/p/php7.2/php7.2-mbstring_7.2.19-0ubuntu0.18.10.1_amd64.deb  404  Not Found [IP: 91.189.91.38 80]
E: Unable to fetch some archives, maybe run apt-get update or try with --fix-missing?

I tried many things, like running sudo apt-get update --allow-unauthenticated or adding [trusted=yes] in /etc/apt/sources.list.

I also checked that I have enough space on the hard drive, and that all permission are working. I disabled ufw but now I'm out of solution...

Any help would be awesome, I even tried this morning a version upgrade since the system was proposing it, and it failed also.

New release '19.10' available.
Run 'do-release-upgrade' to upgrade to it.

Checking for a new Ubuntu release
Your Ubuntu release is not supported anymore.
For upgrade information, please visit:
http://www.ubuntu.com/releaseendoflife

Get:1 Upgrade tool signature [1,554 B]
Get:2 Upgrade tool [1,329 kB]
Fetched 1,331 kB in 0s (0 B/s)
authenticate 'eoan.tar.gz' against 'eoan.tar.gz.gpg'
extracting 'eoan.tar.gz'

Reading cache

Checking package manager

Can not upgrade

An upgrade from 'cosmic' to 'eoan' is not supported with this tool.