Hello,

I have a whole raft of my own scripts running on a very old PC and use the serial ports for dumb VT100 terminals. Backup to /dev/fd0 requires 3 floppies and I'd like to port the whole thing on to a PC that I can backup with more modern hardware. I'm using redhat 8.0. Can anyone suggest how I go about this.

Thanks,
Glen.

Redhat 8.0 is ancient. Hopefully with the new hardware you're going to upgrade to a more modern OS. After RedHat 9.0 the distribution was forked into RHEL (RedHat Enterprise Linux which you have to pay a subscription to update) and Fedora which is free but changes rapidly so requires you to upgrade every 6 months or so.

If you want the newest RHEL OS and don't want to upgrade frequently or pay for subscription you can get CentOS (latest is version 6.x). CentOS is a binary compile from RHEL source so has a much longer lifecycle.

As to porting - scripts generally work the same - the devil will be in the details as commands called by the scripts may be different or no longer exist. My suggestion would be to build your new box, install your new OS then use scp to copy the old scripts to the new box into a directory like /root/oldscripts. Test each of the scripts from /root/oldscripts and troubleshoot the ones that no longer work. Thinks have changed significantly since RedHat 8.0 including a move from kernel 2.4.x to kernel 2.6.x. You might think that staying with RedHat 8.0 is a good idea but no one is making security or bug fixes for it so your system is ripe for hacking.

Many thanks for the reply; My setup is not online and never has been so hacking is not an issue. I use them for incidental mathematical calculations that I once wrote in C, Solaris Unix and VMS before I retired. Redhat 8.0 performs all the things I want it to do very well and the thought of debugging nearly 30 scripts a 1000 lines long each is not a sleep friendly option. Is there scope to improve backing things up to a USB stick. I'm an expert on valves if that helps :-)

Thanks,
Glen.

Besides the security issues (which don't apply to you, as it seems) I doubt that you will get support for new hardware on such an old version.

Thanks again for the reply ..... looks like I'll need to try a new build and experiment with porting. Any advice on this would be most welcome.

Regards,
Glen.

As per MensaWater, scripts (depending on lang) generally work the same, but it depends; what lang are you talking about.
Also, as above, what sort of things/programs do these scripts call.
You can easily copy the scripts over via generic methods eg scp, ftp, email even...
Its the testing that'll be interesting; probably won't be that bad if you're consistent in your code ie one 'fix' may fix many scripts...

Personally I'd also recommend Centos as a replacement OS.

Thanks Chris, really do appreciate your input. My scripts are simple menu driven ones like: echo, sed, awk, sort, cut, uniq, grep, printf etc. Awk does all the maths as it's closest to my C programming days. Must say I find the whole concept of porting up quite daunting having found the Centos a downloadable item. Ideally if I could download Centos onto a CD from my Windows machine and just install the basics to run on my offline machine that would be ideal and any pointers would be very helpful.

Thanks,
Glen.

There's nothing on TV in Brisbane at this time of night, so Chris should respond shortly ....
Download and burning the iso on Windoze is fine - try infrarecorder if you need some (free, good) software for Windoze.

Copying your stuff to USB should work - just make sure it (the USB key) is formatted as [V]FAT. Redhat 8 is real old and may not have the NTFS support - especially for write.

Using core utils such as sed & awk, you may not need to make many changes to your scripts. The problem some people have is the differences between gnu versions and posix versions of some utilities such as sed.

To add to that. Here we successfully migrated scripts and applications from RedHat 7.3 and RedHat 9.0 to RHEL4 then RHEL5 without excessive bother on the scripts and are now using RHEL6 for some things. In fact we've even moved from old FreeBSD servers to RHEL without much issue with scripts. As noted by me and other posters the basic tools (awk, echo, ls, etc...) are not going to be an issue. Even sed may not be if you're not doing anything too complicated with it.

By the way if you're familiar with C and awk then you might want to look at Perl as your scripting language for future scripts as it has its roots in these things.

Thanks to all who have replied to this thread and I'm blown away by the generosity of people's time. I'll need to go and think abourt some of the replies though :-) Perl wise I've done a little but all this scripting came more by accident than design as it started in 2004 and just sort of grew ... If I download centos I'll verify the copy using md5sum and try a straight porting to a spare machine build. I just wish Redhat 8 would support USB writing ...

My thanks to all,
Glen.

I would think USB should work. Are you saying it (definitely) doesn't ?. Might be slow, but should be available.

Your kernel must compiled with support for:
- SCSI disk
- USB Support
- USB Mass support

Here you can read more:
http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Flash-Memory-HOWTO/index.html

The HOWTO was written during RedHat golden age, so I guess you will find it useful.

Thanks again to the new contributors ... I can confirm mass storage doesn't work, spent hours trying. I have one development machine, a main and a standby. All my scripts are sum'd and the RH8 a professional CD set.

Regards to all,
Glen.

Dear All,

I know this thread is old but I've taken your advice and I've found Fedora 16 to replace my Redhat 8 which appears to be understanding my scripts, short term however I need get the floppy drive working and despite my best efforts I've failed. Can anyone help ? ..... I tried Ubuntu 11:10 and the floppy works there fine but Fedora is what I want.

Best Regards,
Glen