Let me make the long story short... Mac OSX / Win user moving to the wonderful world of Linux, which means loves the Linux world, but is a little bit intimidated by command lines, and working with software as is (little or hard to understand docs).

Anyway, I have a 1Ghz celeron, Red Hat Linux 7.3, and Ensim CP.
I played a little bit with the up2date program, and well, found out by myself how to register with the RHN app, and then using up2date to reinstall packages.

My question is, i have no clue if those packages (RPMS) will upgrade my Linux to the latest version, if not, how can I do it without freaking out my poor Linux server?
I wandered the Red Hat site, but now everything I see is pay to download. I remember it was free, I also saw the Fedora thing, but i couldn't find any documentation, only for mounting the ISO images, and nothing else!

Any help for this poor soul? Where to start?

You can get ev1 to reimage your server to the latest rhel version with/without ensim. You can also get them to mount your existing drive so you can copy over the data. But ofcourse this costs $$$ and has some downtime with it. I did the RHEL conversion from a rh7.2 box with ensim 3.1 (I had a 3.5 license but didnt upgrade) to a RHEL plain and they mounted my old drive. It cost me about $50 and took around 6 hours to get it done.

However, there is an alternative.

If you want, you can follow these instructions (http://trilldev.sourceforge.net/files/remotedeb.html) to install debian over any linux operating system. While this would move you to the latest debian install you can adapt the instructions to move to gentoo or fedora. I personally have done the conversion from Fedora core 1 -> Debian as a test and had no problems. Following those instructions wont keep you on redhat but it will upgrade you to the latest version of debian.

Be aware after the conversion to debian you will NOT have ensim installed and unless you backup your data it will be lost.

If you do the debian conversion and need some help, just send me a message on here. I expect fedora has provided their own conversion process but I havent investigated it.

thanx a lot dude! I am right now in the process of saving a 2nd copy of my backup (which thank God I do daily) on my office by remote login, because unfortunately I am very far far from office and home (good to have a spare laptop), but the only available connection is by dialup, and the office has a broadband connection.

I actually was considering the restore option, but frankly I don't mind the downtime, specially because most of my customers are on vacation.


I'll keep an eye on those conversions too, however I am still struggling with a hangover, so I guess this is not a good time to excersise my brain, lol

The conversions don't require much thinking really... But you wont have ensim to load up the customers on.

Just remember if you convert or get ev1 to reimage you will have to set the box up totally as its a new setup. This means all security/patches/config etc needs to be redone.