On Wed, 2005-13-07 at 00:25 +0200, Harald Kapper wrote:
> On Tue, 12 Jul 2005 10:22:46 -0600, Guy Fraser <guy@xxxxxxxxxxxx> 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.
I was providing assistance to an organization that had been trying
to migrate the "mail" and "web" from the rhl9 server to the new RHES4
server. I did not expect it would be a simple job, I have been
administering and writing software for unix for 21 years, I knew I
would have some hurdles to jump. What I didn't expect was a package
manager that wouldn't read the CD's after asking for them. I was able
to manually mount the CD and extract a few missing packages, but when
I discovered that I needed gcc, there were way too many dependencies
so I had to use up2date.
I remember people complaining about the package manager in FC2 or
FC3. If the package had been fixed then, It likely would work in
RHES4. If it is some kind of weird SELinux or permissions problem
it should not exist in a default RHES4. It was not my server and
I was paid to move the files and make things work so that was
what I did. I notified the customer that the package manager does
not work, and it is up to them to pursue it.
Most of my time was spent updating customized scripts and fixing
improperly {as far as RH is concerned} located addon packages. Some
of the other problems were from packages not supported by RH, and
thus RH was not to blame. The customer had also lost some of the
passwords so I had to use "creative" methods to gain access to
superuser level access to dump the data from an older version of
MySQL on the old server in order to populate a current version on
the new server. There were also some dbm based htaccess files that
were incompatible with Apache2, and needed to be "dumped" and
rebuilt. All in all it went pretty much as I expected in about the
time I expected it to take.
My final comment was pertaining to the poor QA, that allowed
something as vital as package management to be released when
it doesn't work out of the box. Since I don't normally maintain
servers with a GUI, I have no ideas what other surprises are in
store for that customer. They are not experts and will rely on
the GUI to do most things. I installed Webmin so they can
maintain things that the GUI doesn't support.
