RHL9 -> RHES4 upgrade

[Harald Kapper]

On Tue, 12 Jul 2005 10:22:46 -0600, Guy Fraser <guy at incentre.net> wrote:

>Don't bet on it.
>
>I spent the weekend transferring a RHL9 server to a new RHES4 server 
>the package manager won't read the CD's. Someone else installed 
>RHES on the machine and did not install any development tools, after 
>messing around trying to get the package manager to work, I gave up 
>and used up2date to get the development system. A few servers had 
>config files that would not allow the server to run without 
>modification. I am glad I did not authorize the purchase, I won't 
>be suggesting it to anyone in the future.

hi
I'm sorry to bounce back here, but I have to tell you that we did this upgrade
way not that directly and yes of course you need a documentation of your systems
and how things are configured - and in case of "old" systems "original" CDs
always come in handy when you need some "old" stuff for those boxes.

the whole trick behind version-bases especially in redhat is that one config
file will work for one package during the whole lifecycle, this is why patches
are backported and re-bases are very hard to introduce, eg. when we went from
sendmail-8.9 to -8.10 the autonewalias option was suddenly gone and alle
email-config-systems that relied on this 8.9 feature would have seized working
if we simply would have upgraded without asking, therefore the backports of
redhat of new fixes to 8.9 were exactly the right thing.
the downside of this is always that you won't get the new cool things for a
while but this is the deal of a static frozen release that will be supported and
that will work within given parameters as specified - no questions asked.

I have to emphasize and will be quiet afterwards *g* - upgrading is virtually
never just inserting a new set of discs and reboot - you will always have to
consider what is new and what is gone (like dovecot with fc2 and lots of people
having no pop3-server all of a sudden).

I'd recommend redhat-enterprise-products any time (working with redhat stuff
since 7+ years and at least 6 years virtually troublefree), but of course there
is not always the need for that hardened products and support then you probably
should go fedora.

regards
Harald Kapper, icq# 36178328         http://kapper.net
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ps. should I try to ask for a php-4.4.0 rebase for fc3? ;-P