Several noob questions
 

New to Mandrake but not to Linux. Just took over 8 Mandrake 9.1 systems from someone who left the company not under the best circumstances.

1) Learned the hard way that a mortal user needs to be in the wheel group to be able to su. Is this a Mandrake weirdness or something that the outgoing guy did to cause problems?

2) File protections are so tight that mortal users can't do much. e.g. doing an ls of the / dir gives a permissions denied. Again, a Mandrake weirdness of sabotage?

3) I am assuming that if there was a support agreement with the Mandrake guys it's long since expired. For my own planning purposes, how big/risky a deal is it to go from 9.1 to 10.whatever? These machines are in "production" mode so if an upgrade has problems, users would get upset.

4) I am used to distros like RH where you get everything whether you want it or not. I wanted to set up an Intranet server on one of these machines but I don't see apache installed on any of them anywhere. I haven't checked but I'm guessing the tools to build it from source aren't there either. Is there an easy way to install missing stuff via RPM, binary or whatever means?

I'll be turning these servers over to another admin in a few months after I get everything stable so whatever I do needs to be maintainable by others.

Many thanks in advance for your input/help/suggestions!

Going from 9.x to 10.x is highly problematic and not recommended.

You are best off performing a clean installation.

Re: "Missing" stuff (which is not actually missing...)

Follow the directions on my sig.

Mandrake has a system somewhat similiar to apt-get called urpmi.

Almost any package you can think of is available via URPMI once you have followed the directions to set up your sources.

Note that while the 9.x repositories are still available, you really WANT to upgrade.

You mention that these are "production" machines. What does this mean?

As file servers? Please specify.

" I get everything stable so whatever I do needs to be maintainable by others."

Once Linux is set up, what more needs to be done?

Except for the occasional update, what do others have to do, except to avoid hitting the power or reset switch?