RE: RHN Confusion

[Tom Diehl <tdiehl rogueind com>]

On Fri, 31 Dec 2004, Craig White wrote:

> On Fri, 2004-12-31 at 08:06 -0600, Daniel Wittenberg wrote:
> > Actually the difference between AS & ES is almost nothing, so switching
> > between the two can be done on the fly.  I've gone back and forth on
> > machines before with no ill-effects.
> > 
> > > I have a client with 2 systems purchased from Dell and they had AS 3
> > > ($1499 each) and that dog isn't gonna hunt. They should have been ES 3
> > > and according to sales dept., we would have to wipe installation and
> > > install anew.
> ---
> sales department was very clear on their statement that I could not
> switch from AS to ES without wiping install and doing new install. 

And if you replace the redhat-release package with the correct one for the
entitlement you want to use, no one can tell the difference. There are
actually a few other packages like comps-*, and anaconda-*, but the one
rhn cares about is redhat-release. Actually now that I think about it I
an not sure the comps-* and anaconda-* packages differ between AS and ES.
They are different for AS to WS but that is not what we are talking about here.


> I was not concerning myself with the particulars of how to do it, only
> the approved/supported methodology.

Remember sales != support. Generally speaking my experience with sales people
is they know how to sell but know nothing about support.

If you look at the iso's for AS and ES you will see that the md5sums for all
of them are the same except for the disc 1. That is where the changes are. I do
not have access to ES ATM, but I suspect that if you compare the packages on
disc 1 of AS and disc 1 of ES you will only see 3 or 4 packages that are different.

For WS if you look at the rpms installed on disc1 there are only 3.
They are 
anaconda-product-3-2WS.noarch.rpm
comps-3WS-0.20041216.i386.rpm
redhat-release-3WS-7.4.i386.rpm

When you look at AS there are 30 rpms on disc 1. They are the server packages
included included with AS + the 3 listed above.

In short, no reinstall is needed.

HTH,

Tom