State of 7.2/8.0 in Fedora Legacy

[Michael Mansour]

Hi,

> > Likewise, I agree with the proposal. Personally, I've upgraded any RH7.1
> > -> 7.2 machines through to 7.3. That process itself is fairly painless
> > and 7.3 & 9 are the most supported legacy distros.
> >
> > As for RH8.. :) Why anyone would run it is beyond me and upgrading to
> > RH9 is painless too (even remotely). :)

I think that is just opinion, I have used 3 RH8 machines in production for 
years without dramas. I didn't like the 7 series and 9 didn't show me any 
major reason to upgrade. Most of my production servers are now Fedora Core 1 
(going on FC2 as of last nights testing), with only 2 RH8 machines still 
residing in production which I'm migrating to FC1/2 as we speak.

What did/do I use RH8 for? squid proxy caching, iptables (shoreline) firewall, 
Webmail, DNS, DHCP, Samba, portslave/freeradius, VOCP, mrtg, Spamassassin, 
Mailscanner, etc, the list goes on and on. It's stable and I've never had 
dramas with it.

> I've personally got a Redhat 7.1 box and a Redhat 8 box both of 
> which I've considered upgrading, however I'm very skeptical about 
> doing it for fear of it stuffing up. (these boxen are in production!)
>  :)
> 
> How well does the upgrade happen? does it keep config files and so forth?

Personally I have never "upgraded" RH operating systems, I'm not comfortable 
with doing that on anything other than Debian. What I do when upgrading Red 
Hat is to go through a re-install process like:

* install the upgraded environment on a test machine
* test it
* if ok, buy new drives
* yank the drives that are in the old systems
* put in new drives
* mirror them
* go through install procedure as performed on test
* test
* enter production

Worst case, yank the new drives and put the old ones back in.

That's a cheap upgrade process. You could buy a new server and go that route 
(I have done that also and it's fine) or (for even cheaper process) you could 
Ghost your old drives and re-install then Ghost back if things don't work.

Michael.