Re: Is my old RedHat computer doomed?

[Unruh <unruh-spam@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Kevin Buzzard <buzzard@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:

>Cluttering up my bedroom is an 8-year-old laptop with 192 megs of RAM
>(yeah, it was pretty state of the art at the time) and a 6 gig
>hard drive. It has Redhat 8.0 installed on it and it's a fine machine:
>it is super-super stable and although it can't quite handle Firefox 2
>it's the machine I use every morning to e.g. read the news before I get up,
>and I regularly ssh to other machines from it to read mail etc.

>I have been loathe to change the OS---why fix it if it ain't broke?
>Upgrading from RH7 to RH8 in 2002 already cost me a lot in terms of
>responsiveness. But now I am a bit concerned that it probably *is*
>broke, and quite seriously broke, because of the recent DNS resolving
>issue thing and reports yesterday that good sploits are now

What in the world has that to do with your home computer? You are not, I
assume running a DNS server on your machine. There is no dns cache to
poison.

>circulating in the wild. I'm not so sure that RedHat are going to
>come up with a security patch for an old RH8 machine. On the other

They won't but why do you care. 

>hand I am concerned that any major OS upgrade is going to do for
>the machine completely. Do people have any advice (other than "buy
>a new machine")? Can I patch the nameserver issue myself somehow
>[note that *everything* is old: gcc 3.2, perl 5.8.0, etc etc]?

There is nothing to patch unless you are running it as a DNS server.


>If I attempt to install a new OS am I likely to get a machine that
>barely moves?  etc etc.

It depends on what dances you ask it to do. Running large X programs will
be out. But pine will work fine.