CentOS 7 End of Life: Extended Support, ELevate or Rebuild

More than two years past its date, a CentOS 7 server has no free security fixes for anything: the kernel, OpenSSH, OpenSSL, Apache, PHP, MariaDB. Every flaw found since June 2024 is open on it.

It may not even install software. The mirror list was switched off, so yum fails with “Could not retrieve mirrorlist” until it is pointed at vault.centos.org. That gets packages installing again, but they are the final versions, frozen.

The defaults are from a different era: PHP 5.4, Python 2.7, MariaDB 5.5, OpenSSL 1.0.2. Applications on these servers often depend on that, which is why they are still there, and why the move needs testing rather than just doing.