Upgrade from RH3 to RED4 or RH5
 

Hi there,
I am new to Linux OS admin and I need some info with upgrading our current RED HAT 3,0 advance server 64 bit to either RH4 or 5. I have been told by experts that they only way is to do a complete reinstall of the OS layer from scratch. However as we have full Oracle cluster layer installed and running on these nodes, that would a hell of job for the poor DBA team to take and reinstall the Oracle layers again.

Is there no such thing as an Upgrade in Linux? Is this a normal practice to simply reinstall the OS?

thanks in advance. Hamish

It is not the fact. There is a facility to upgrade your distribution. But some distributions that I tried to upgrade viz. Fedora did give me problems and complete re install solved them.
But not necessarily you will have problems after upgrade. If you have paid for subscription to RH then they might provide the telephone support as well.