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

[John Morris]

On Wed, 8 Dec 2004, Wes A. Jones wrote:

> I've just discovered WBEL and centOS, and one or two others that are 
> based on RHEL. After reading the archives, it appears that everyone is 
> worried about updates and such. Which is a good worry. But just answer a 
> stupid persons question. If all these "clones" are so close to RH, could 
> you not simply use RH's updates? Or make your own RPM's? I come for 
> years of Slackware (back when it was SLS), and yes, I'm used to doing 
> nothing but compiling. And I have used RH for years as well (RH4.x as I 

For 90+ percent of errata, just "rpmbuild --rebuild" will get you there.  
Another couple percent of packages need trademark removal for wide 
distribution but depending on how you use it may not.  At any rate, anyone 
who knows their way around an rpm should be able to port the existing 
patch forward.  Once in a while a package comes along that needs a little 
more work to make a perfectly redistributable package but again, for 
internal use that isn't a problem.

> 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.

I have done it, and can say that you should expect a few glitches.  Our
primary server was pretty much a pathelogical case and it lived through
it.  It started life running Caldera Network Desktop (derived from RH3.3
as I recall) then upgraded through at least 4.0, 4.1, 4.2, 5.0, 5.1, 6.1
and 7.3 before making the jump to WBEL3.

-- 
John M.      http://www.beau.org/~jmorris        This post is 100% M$ Free!
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