Hi Everyone

I had a Intel 100 Mhz bucket running Redhat 6.2, now I got a Pentium II 233 Mhz and intend replace the old server + upgrade to RedHat 7.3. To this I have some questions:

1. I will put the harddisk into the new machine then run an upgrade. Is that recommended? I would like to keep my old config, but I don't know if the upgrade will take advantage of all the new hardware.

2. The kernels are as far as I know customized, so I had a 586 version running before and now I will need a 686 (pentium II) right? Does the upgrade process replace the kernel to the right CPU class?

3. To which version should I upgrade? I heard that zero versions are not recommended, meaning 7.0 or 8.0 should not be used. Also I heard that 8.1 or so has some problems with some libraries that make it difficult for things to be compiled "out of the box".
(I am considering to go to 7.3, because I intend to run a firewall and the 6.2 kernel is supposed to have some holes)

4. The machine I have is not so powerful, so I like to stay lean and efficient. The new versions are getting fatter and fatter. Is that also being heavier on the machine? Is it recommendable to stay at a lower version to keep the machine running smooth (like in Windows, I still use Win98 for exact that reason)? Does the kernel get fatter and fatter too? Any way to slim it down?

5. Is there any reason to stay with an older release? I know that there are known security holes and my machine will be connected to the internet in the future, that is why I am asking...

Thanks for any pointers..

Markus

I have a 233 running RH8 with full kde GUI and allthough it is not lightning fast it is certainly tolerable. (probably just as fast if not faster than win98) and the RH installs the kernel as modules, so only the drivers etc that you need are in your memory. even on the 233 the cpu cycles are 85%-90% idle, so the better question is how much RAM you have.

As far as upgrades, I would stick to doing a fresh install, as upgrades are sometimes buggy. If you want to keep your personal settings simply copy your home directory to a CD, or other partition, or wherever it will fit (be sure to keep permissions intact), then with your new install create the same user and password, and overwrite your new home directory with your old one. Voila, all your personal settings are still intact (including mail, bookmarks, and all that jazz)

RH8 does have some bugs (like you said .0 versions usually do) but they are more of annoyances than anything else. 7.3 is a good distro though...so if you want to use that go for it.

btw, don't quote me on this but I believe that a P2 processor is an i586

Very useful pointers!

7.3 it is then. By win98 I only ment for desktops, since there I still consider windows kind of unavoidable. And there I prefer it, since Win2000 and Win XP is just such a resource killer where it clogs up your RAM and hogs your CPU and you get the same OS, "to run your programs", although without crashes.
But for any server (and mine is one), I only recommend Linux, since with that hardware, you won't get windows on it AND Linux is easier to configure, more stable and no bullshit "we wanna make profit with it, forget the rest..."
Well, what am I talking about....you know all that of course...

The machine (233 mhz) has 128 megs by the way. I think that should be enough?
I had on the old one (100mhz, 64megs, RH 6.2) samba, dhcp, DNS, Printserver, Lotus Domino (Lotus Notes) Mail/Database/Web server, and it all ran like a dream.
I guess I was a little lucky and so I intend to use a bigger machine now.

When upgrading, I mainly want to preserve the whole config of everything, services, servers etc.. the home dir would be the smallest problem. I did one trial upgrade already and it looks pretty good.
What kinds of bugs would/should I expect?
I see that they killed linuxconf, but wonder WHY.. that thing was very useful and simple. Now we got these 3 or so (redhat-config-network etc.)
Does anybody know if this new configurator(s) can also be run WITHOUT Xwin?

So, looks like I am ready to go for the migration.

Thanks again

Markus

128 MB of ram is enough to run RH 7.3 ok. The bugs I refer to are differences of where certain apps and libraries may be located by default, this may especially be a problem when upgrading major versions (ie: 6.2 -7.3) but by all means give it a try, your mileage may vary. I would still reccomend backing up all your important data though, but you knew that.

Good luck with your upgrade and let us know how it went...

Hi again

It went pretty good.
The upgrade was okey, but the service config still listed the old versions of the services (ipchains instead of iptables) etc, so I then thought about your recommendation and did a whole new install (with backup of course).
Then I migrated all the data over to the new box.
Now there is one thing that does not get into my head:
what happened to linuxconf?

I mean that tool was so nice. I found that there are now redhat-config-network and all these but:
1. they only run on X. What is THAT?
2. A lot of things are left out. Where to config Samba? DHCP? What happened to SWAT?
On my 6.2 RH I had webmin in the beginning because a friend recommended it to me and it was really great, till I found out that linuxconf did all that and more.
NOW I feel like getting webmin again, so I have ONE tool that does it all.
What about all that? Am I missing something? Isn't that a step back? Removing all that ease?
Also, there is no mention in the RH manual about WHY they made this change.

Maybe you are going to laugh at these questions (...doesn't this guy know the obvious..), so maybe you know the reason for all these questions.
OR is everybody feeling that way?

Greetings

Markus

Hello,

I've never used linuxconf, but as for the others, they must be there somewhere. Do you use your locate db to find them? SWAT and DHCP are still there, you may just have to find them. DHCP should have been configured automatically when you set up your network (if you selected it).

Which version did you end up installing? Was it a full install or other (ie: workstation/desktop/server)

I gotl RH 7.3, with a custom install. I think from what I saw so far it's pretty good.
What I saw was, that the kernel (when it was copied during install) is 35 Megs BIG. Can that be? Would that huge thing be loaded into memory completely?
If yes, I will have to consider recompiling it and remove things that I will never use.

About SWAT: Yes, I tried to locate it with locate and the only file it reported was:
/usr/doc/samba_x.y.z/example/misc/swat.pl

Don't know exactly what .pl is but I know that much: There should be about a dozen more files on that query.

The rest of the system is very nice configure. Installer did a great job. I am just trying to get a handle on changing configurations in a nice and easy way, without making a doctorate on config-formats, like done before with linuxconf. Of course, I don't want to be a "windows user" and know that a system needs to be understood to be controlled fully.

So off I go to find a routing tutorial. Gotta fill my knowledge holes ;-)

BTW: How long have you been using Linux?

thanks

Markus

.pl is a perl script, or perl source source file. I think you may have neglected to install some of the packages you wanted during your custon install.

I have SWAT in /usr/sbin/swat so you may want to use kpackage (or the command line) and install the missing packages from your install cd's.

As far as 35MB kernel, I don't think so. You must be talking about the kernel source or something. Your working kernel is installed in /boot and should only be from 1-3 MB depending on the drivers/features that are included. It is usually called vmlinux which is a symlink to vmlinux-<version number> in the same directory.As I said, I believe that Redhat installs it using modules, so only the drivers you are using are in memory, then the kernel flushes them when the have been unused for 5 minutes or so.

There must be some command to show how much RAM the kernel is using but ps and top don't appear to show it. Anybody reading this know?

Yah..

Free

total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 2323724 450256 1873468 0 77244 95372



Um.. Browny, you might want to take a look at :

setup

It's not as comprehensive as linuxconf, but it does the basics. It's essentially a pretty console frontend for a heap of other configuration programs.

Linuxconf had *heaploads* of holes in it. It was wonderful, but massively insecure and for every patch I installed on my RH6.2 system it seemed another 3 exploits opened up.

You'll find though, that if you can get X up and runnnig you can do everything that linuxconf did and more without having to hunt around for the various (changed) commands Redhat have littered around your sparkly new install.

Slick.

Okey, I missed some packages that I should have installed. SWAT was not installed, that simple.

Configuration with X is great, but thanks for the tip with setup. I am glad I have a command line (non x) tool for that, since it is faster on my old bucket.

About linuxconf: Security hole? So THAT is why they abandoned it? Makes now finally sense.


In all, I have to say that upgrading to Redhat 7.3 was very very good. A lot of problems evaporated by doing it.


One thing that eludes me so far (maybe somebody of you knows this)
Iptables (new) and ipchains (old):
Which one is my box using? I see them pop up everywhere together. I would like to use iptables, but the lokkit (config tool) seems to write ichains format and not iptables.
And also: The scripts for runlevel 3 (which is my default): first kill ipchains and then start iptables?
Are there 2 config files? 1 for ipchains and one for iptables?

Do I understand this firewalling this right?:
let say I want a solid wall on INPUT (eth1) and poke holes for the stuff I want to go through.
For this, I set the default policy to DENY and then define the ones I want to go though with rules that go to target ACCEPT, right?

Lokkit writes everything pretty clear, but sets the default policy for INPUT to Accept. That should let everything that is not specially defined through, right?

I hope I am not off topic with firewalling here.

Greets

Markus

Ah, I forgot an important fact:
I did no upgrade. This is a fresh RH 7.3 install. This just, because I think that 7.3 (Kernel 2.4) SHOULD be using iptables right away, isnt't that so?
So what is ipchains still doing hanging around?
But it I want to list the rules with the command iptables --list or something, the thing drowns me with errormessages and concludes: Looks like you need to update your kernel.
Is it then running on ipchains instead of iptables?

??? confusion ???? ;-)

Thanks

Markus

I just use chkconfig to turn ipchains off and let iptables be the only active from run level 3-6. That seems to work, and I did not lose any netfilter functionality

The iptables vs ipchains issue was confusing me as well, so I asked about it in the security forum. I was told that it is okay to disable ipchains and just use iptables. I guess they include both because some people like using oldschool tools, who knows?

Here.. this might help clear some confusion :

http://www.codeblast.com/~gert/linux/iptables.html

Essentially, you can only have one loaded at a time. By default it appears Redhat 7.x has ipchains, and Redhat 8 does away with chains, and gives you tables

I expect they included both for compatability reasons. With a major number upgrade like 8.0 you can *expect* things to break and for apps to have changed the way they work. With a minor number like 7.x+1 it's not expected and people will complain



Slick.

Ahh, thanks a lot. That URL cleaned things up completely.

I'll dump the old chain then and get some new tables into the house ;-)

Thanks

Markus