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Re: To upgrade or not to upgrade?



On Sun, 15 Jun 1997, Shlomi Fish wrote:

> Normally, I use Linux as an individual workstation offline, with the
> various daemons running. If I connect it to the Internet using SLIP I kill
> inetd (which includes telnet, rlogin and stuff), httpd, sendmail and
> syslogd, and X runs only on a UNIX-domain socket.

KILLING inetd? why not use the blocking options in the tcp wrappers'
hosts.deny?

and if you don't need httpd, just don't run it. I saw many stand alones
that fire up mars, apache, apmd, pcmcia extensions and nfsd/mountd because
"it came built in". why run memory-eating processes if you're gonna kill
them anyway once you do anything with the net, and you never use them
offline...?

> 1. If I should upgrade to RH 4.2 - can I do it using the 
> misc/ftp-upgrade script? Or if not, what is the easiest and
> least time/resource consuming way. (without buying a CD of the distribution)

if you have a permanent link: do the FTP and expect it to take a while,
otherwise download it somehow and do a local disk install. Personally I'm
not sure if you would even want to upgrade...

> 
> 2. Should I update the kernel to version 2.0.30, or is v 2.0.29 OK too?

http://www.linuxhq.com will tell you the diffs. the main patch in the
boost to Internet services, but you're not running as server...

> 3. What about XFree86 3.3? I heard about the stuff, that users of X can get
> root privileges, but should it concern me and was it solved in the 3.3
> version. 
> Normally, I prefer to compile the source code rather than download a binary
> or rpm. But downloading and compiling X can take ages, and I'm rather
> limited on space.

what's the question then?

> 
> 4. Apache - basically, I can d-load the source, compile and replace the
> server binary with the newly compiled one - or can I?

yes, it's that simple. did it 4 times this week.


> 5. Should I download the latest version of sendmail (8.8.6) and compile it?
> Would I have to somehow rebuild or update my sendmail configuration files,
> so it won't report that they belong to an older version?

sendmail is a beast, either download RPMs or just stick to what you have
(you're no attack target, since you are not a stationary server)

> BTW, If I manually compile a new version instead of an older one, is there
> any way I can adjust the version of the program in the rpm database? (like
> changing package "apache-1.0.2" to "apache-1.2"?) 

rpm -U will do the trick.


   -------------------------------------------------------------
   Ira Abramov          <ira@scso.com>        Scalable Solutions
   POBox 3600, Jerusalem 91035, Israel       Tel (972)2-642-6822
   http://www.scso.com/~ira   Check out: http://www.linux.org.il


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