Phil’s Diary - [Blog @ http://www.philsdiary.net/]
For a while now there have been bits of my linux machine (the one serving this page up to you now) that I’ve wanted to update. OpenSSL for one example.
But as is often the way with computers this seems to be a little harder than you’d think.
Building and compiling a new version of OpenSSL isn’t really a problem. But installing it in the slightly non-standard way it was originally installed isn’t.
An RPM doesn’t seem to be the answer as there are far too many dependancies.
The obvious answer is to upgrade to the latest version of distro and start again.
Now I’ve had a quick look at updating Redhat (what I use), and it’s not all wonderful. It’ll happily do the update for you, but as you can imagine if you’ve ever tinkered on the commandline, it doesn’t really like config files, and so renames any old ones, and just creates blank new fresh ones.
Of course this then means you’ve the same problem as when you first installed linux, going through each of the programs, sevices etc. and reconfigruing them.
That’s obviously going to take a while, break things, and generally not be good. Especially for something like this machine, that acts as a webserver, mailserver, and general backup server. It’s taken me ages to get it where it is today, and would no doubt take a long time to get any newer version to the same state.
So the only real idea I can see is that I get a new machine, and get building a new box from scratch, and then gradually move services and data over from the old to new, once parts of it are correctly installed and working.
That’s a cool idea. But I don’t have any suitable PCs to do this with. I mean, it’s already running on a P3, 800Mhz. The next fastest PC I’ve got is an old Celeron 300. Not so good.
Anyway, I guess for the time being I’ll have to live with the old, and see if I can upgrade odds and ends which aren’t so key, central and critical.
It’s all a bit of a mess though, but no different from any other OS.
Posted by Phil on December 07, 2004 07:50 PM | Categories: Linux
You just hit the main strenght of Linux.
The ability to configure your installation to do just what you want in the way you want it is the main strenght of Linux over Windows.
It also makes upgrading problematic.
Posted by: sjon at December 8, 2004 6:51 AM