nixCraft

Hi,

I am using RHEL3 and RHEL4 in my production environment. Well, one of application need glibc-2.4 and later to run on it and I need to upgrade glibc-2.3 to glibc-2.4 or above.

Http (apache), vsftp, mysql, php, nfs, and some other 3rd party servers like tomcat are installed/configured on these machines. To be honest I dont have any down time but I will manage some downtime if it would be very necessary.

Can someone guide me the best and safest way to upgrade the glibc?

RHEL3 -------

$ cat /etc/redhat-release
Red Hat Enterprise Linux ES release 3 (Taroon Update 9)

$ uname -r
2.4.21-32.ELsmp

$ rpm -qa | grep glibc
glibc-2.3.2-95.50
glibc-headers-2.3.2-95.50
glibc-kernheaders-2.4-8.34.5
glibc-common-2.3.2-95.50
glibc-devel-2.3.2-95.50

RHEL4 ------

# cat /etc/redhat-release
Red Hat Enterprise Linux ES release 4 (Nahant Update 4)

# uname -r
2.6.9-5.ELsmp

# rpm -qa | grep glibc
glibc-common-2.3.4-2.25
glibc-devel-2.3.4-2.25
glibc-2.3.4-2.25
glibc-kernheaders-2.4-9.1.98.EL
glibc-headers-2.3.4-2.25


waiting for any help.

Many thanks.

No, you can't. RHEL works on 5 year long time period support. To get latest glibc, you need to upgrade RHEL 4 or RHEL 5.

You can compile yourself but it is going to hurt a lot. Therefor, I recommend upgrading entire distro.

__________________
Vivek Gite
Linux Evangelist
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Thanks for you reply. so you mean I should go for upgrade directly to RHEL5 from DVD? If i upgrade it then what would happen to the existing services dependencies? like who knows mysql/http or nfs depends on the libs.

If i get the licenses for these boxes from Redhat, would up2date will help in this scenario?

You can upgrade but I strongly recommend backing up system. Also, up2date only works with RHEL 4.x. RHEL 5.x has yum, which can update to any new version. up2date has many limitations.

__________________
Vivek Gite
Linux Evangelist
Be proud RHEL user, and let the world know about your enterprise choices! Join RedHat user group.
Always use CODE tags for posting system output and commands!
Do you run a Linux? Let's face it, you need help

You mean up2date will not work on RHEL3? what risks would be to use up2date?