Hi,
I have recently taken on responsibility for an old Fedora 6 (remote) webserver that has been sitting happily serving web and mail for the last 2-3 years.

I have learned that an upgrade to the current Fedora version is difficult without a complete reinstall, and am wondering:

a) Is there an upgrade path to current Fedora version that does not require starting from scratch (and won't take forever)? or...

b) Should I take this opportunity to reinstall completely using Debian (which I am more familiar with), or some other flavour of linux? (considering I don't get much time for maintenance) - since Fedora seems to require a lot of keeping up with, and has less support than it used to, or...

c) What are the risks involved in just leaving the current F6 installation (which is after-all running happily and has been for years) and getting on with something less time consuming on my to-do list?

I would be very grateful for any thoughts more experienced members might have.

Many Thanks

Dear Fox:
If I'm reading your post correctly, you are keeping the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" option open, and that is comforting, especially if you still have clients depending on this box.

So that leads me to some questions: who's still being served by this unit, and for what services? If it's retired, might it be needed in service again if something else fails? If no one needs it now, what functions can you imagine adding if it's reconfigured?

Have you considered this possibility? Remove the disk drive, label it and put it on the shelf. Then install a scratch drive and play with distros and server roles to your heart's content.

Also, if you opt to keep it in service, and the hardware is getting older, what redundancy have you arranged to respond to catastrophic failure?

Best regards
....MontyMan.

Hi MontyMan,
Thanks for your response.
I am always heavily in favour of the 'if it ain't bust...' response - nothing to do with me being a lazy B*&*^* !
This server is actually live and serving 100 - 200 GB /month of web and mail - it's far from retired. So experimentation is out. It is remotely located in a server farm, and there is a daily incremental/weekly full backup with the option of switch to another machine in the event of failure - but like you imply, a switch would not be simple with an eol distro...

Cheers,