[WBEL-users] Very stupid question, but....

[Jan-Albert van Ree]

On Wed, Dec 08, 2004 at 08:42:17AM -0500, Wes A. Jones wrote:

> Please keep in mind, I am "SEARCHING" for a good solution for my new 
> project. I don't care too much about updates since I do that myself most 
> of the time. But I am curious about all these "clones". Are they not 
> cross compatible? Can they not use RH's updates?

You can indeed use RedHat's SRPM updates. However if you want to use them in a commerical enviroment for 3rd party use there might be some trademarks that need to be wiped, like John did for Whitebox.
 
> While I'm asking questions...... Can WBEL upgrade a RH7.3 system without 
> formatting the drive and loosing all the data in the dirs? I'm really 
> not wanting to screw with all the user settings again. I have over 400  
> users on my box now.

Depends... I'm preparing to do the same between christmas and new year with a server at work. It runs RedHat 7.3 with some proprietry database (Advantage, a serious piece of crap I hate to say) which requires a RedHat-like distro.

I intend to wipe all binary partitions, leave /home intact and copy back most stuff from /etc, which I backup every week, such as passwords. After that I remount /home and all permissions and such should still be intact. Might cost several hours downtime but I can't come up with a better way right now.
-- 
Jan-Albert van Ree        | http://www.vanree.net/brickpiles/
VanReeDotNet IT Solutions | http://www.vanree.net