Some what off tangent....at my last place of employment....we also have a production server hosting a variety of critical databases and apps (such as CRM), and web servers. (oh yeah, it also does license key generation....) The machine is almost old enough to drive (just needs to the older machine next to it to get a license). Upgrading the OS and hardware would be easy, but it is all the stuff on the system that isn't. The database software won't run on the new OS, and the new software is different enough that it won't be a dump and load. Plus the old interfaces are no longer supported....FORTRAN/COBOL....though I'm pretty sure I recall that the modules are available to existing customers.... Also architectural changes, mean the old OS won't run on new hardware, and the new OS won't run on this hardware..... Now those of that had to maintain this beast...had lobbied to get the machine upgraded. Except that it is expensive in time and money to do the migration right and minimize downtime (I remember the last OS upgrade, having to come in at 2am on a Sunday....) ...instead in a cost cutting measure by the company....we all lost our jobs. So, this machine continues to live as is.....ignoring the fact that every time there's a significant power outage (and summer is just around the corner)....the machine goes down and loses at least one hard drive (and recovery has been to steal parts from the older computer next to it). What's bad...is that the request to buy the new machine did get approved at some point....so now it is sitting idle somewhere. At one time, there was talk of bring one of us back as a consultant to do the upgrade. But, they haven't gotten the funding approval to do it yet...and I'm not going to be around forever (since I'm in the process of moving to a new Unix SA job out of state)...and the other main SA was pretty disgruntled when he got notice (he was the last person left, so he thought he was safe....except that we were all SA's not working under the formal IT org...they got rid of that person in December of 1999 after he finished all the Y2K patching) So, the RH7.3 boxes...are only about 4-4.5 years old....so they still have a dozen years of life expected out of them. Though the hardware is older than that, because they had gone through the hand me down process a couple of times, before nobody wanted to have them on their desks. I remember starting in '98 with a P75 running NT as my desktop (though it mainly did MS Word and Outlook, had an IBM RS6K model 25T as my workstation). Maybe when those dozen years go by, they can afford to have consultants in to upgrade them. Meanwhile...as I've been packing up my mess....I finally found my Red Hat 7.3 CDs....so I'm now a step closer to building another RH7.3 box. Lawrence -- fedora-legacy-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-legacy-list
