On Sun, 29 Jan 2006, in the Usenet newsgroup comp.os.linux.admin, in article
<fqydnZjk3NcxAUDeRVn-ow@comcast.com>, Rick Ingham wrote:

>I think so much is out of date, possibly including standard file
>structures/locations and stuff that everything needs to go. I think I'm
>better off biting the bullet and building a new system from scratch and
>migrating files and users over afterward.

Yeah, that's actually what I was trying to say ;-)

>I noticed this weekend, it's actually version 6.1, so it's even a little
>older than what I stated before. We've never updated anything on it.

6.1 came out in October 1999, and support ended in March 2001. I don't
recall us installing it - we jumped from 4.2 to 6.2, and the 5.2 systems
went to 7.2 or 7.3..

>It's been rock solid since day 1. Last time I checked, a month or two
>ago, it had been up solid for well over a year. I don't think we have
>another system in 180+ data centers that's been more reliable or up
>longer.

The problem about long uptimes is that it means you are not updating the
system for problems. I think there was only one worm that was targeting
it ("luckgo" going after holes in nfs-utils), but that would also have
had wu-ftpd-2.5.0 (2.6.0 was later exploited), and I don't even think it
came with SSH.

>It's the only Linux system we have. The rest are now all
>Solaris and Windows servers.

My condolences. Still, I've been supporting SunOS4 in addition to Slowaris.

>Matter of fact, what spawned the inquiry is that I need to update gcc,
>and the system has very little space left.

Depending how far, you probably also need to update glibc2. I doubt any
of the modern gccs will work with glibc2.1.2. For perspective, FC4 is
glibc-2.3.5. There's been a LOT of water under that bridge.

Old guy