I'm a newbie to yum. Like many others I'm sure, the announcement by RH that they were discontinuing all versions of Red Hat Linux took me by surprise. It was particularly annoying since I'd spent a lot of time (I'm no expert) configuring a RH8 web server. I found Up2Date very useful. I subscribed to the demo version and simply ran it via cron job once a week. I imagine Up2Date for RH8 will be gone by the end of the year so time to look for an alternative and yum got a mention on the MailScanner list. So, just downloaded it and installed it. Entered "yum" on the command line and then had a guess and did "yum install". Huge list of packages were listed and got an error at the end. Tried "yup update" after that and 2 packages got updated. In the meantime, I've been looking for documentation. Can't find any at http://www.linux.duke.edu/projects/yum. I see references to a draft Howto on this list, but can't find the actual Howto. Can someone point me to it? More generally, I'm uncertain what to do regarding a Linux distro for my server. It isn't live yet so now is the perfect time to change distro if need be. I'm seeking stability above all else. Apart from apps included with RH8, I'm running MailScanner, SpamAssassin and 42go (a web based management tool). I access the server over the Internet. My current web server is 3 years old and I imagine getting about the same life out of the new one. So, given I want to have minimal downtime for 3 years (no complete reinstall during this time) then should I take my chances with RH8 and use yum to apply security patches or bite the bullet and switch to another distro? The distros supported by MailScanner and 42go limit me to SUSE, Debian or Mandrake. I've had recommendations for all of them, but if possible I'd rather just stick with what I've got, so long as I could be confident that security updates would be available for a few years.
