RHEL 4 End of Life Date
RHEL 4 end-of-life date, support status, and CVE risk. Data from endoflife.date and official vendor documentation.
RHEL 4 was released on February 15, 2005 and support ended on February 29, 2012 — a supported lifespan of 7 years and 1 month, shorter than the 10 years and 1 month median for RHEL releases. It was not an LTS release; RHEL reserves longer patch windows for its LTS versions. The last patch it will ever receive is 4.9, published February 16, 2011 — 1 year before support ended. It has been without security patches for 14 years and 6 months. 4 newer RHEL releases have shipped since.
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When RHEL 4 reaches end of life, the maintainers stop issuing security patches for this version. CVEs discovered after the EOL date are publicly disclosed on the National Vulnerability Database with no patch available. Exploit code frequently appears on GitHub within days of disclosure.
The CVE blind spot: Most vulnerability scanners check for known CVEs but do not flag the ongoing accumulation of unpatched vulnerabilities in EOL software versions. Running RHEL 4 past its EOL date creates a permanently growing attack surface that standard security tooling will not surface.
Migrate to RHEL 10 or implement compensating controls — network segmentation, enhanced monitoring, restricted access — while migration is underway.