> Oh, and update your OS as well if you can. RH 8.0 is also no longer
> supported. It has many unpatched security bugs. You are running an
> unreliable, unstable version of postgresql on an unreliable, insecure
> platform.
indeed. The 'proper' upgrade is a clean install of a up to date
supported distribution, perhaps RHEL4 or CentOS4, or perhaps something
else, however I also know how hard this can be on a production system.
There is an alternative, the Fedora people have a 'fedora legacy'
project which is still supporting RH9 with critical fixes, you can
fairly easily update RH8 to RH9 (they are very similar systems), and
then get the latest updates for this platform.
This will give you some breathing room while you plan the major upgrade
to RHEL4 or something else...
I've done this on some production servers where there was lack of money
or resources to setup a whole new server (these are servers that belong
to 3rd parties for which noone is being paid to run, so there were no
resources available for a proper upgrade).
I would first dump backups of all your postgres databases(!!) Then I'd
make backups of all your core file systems so you can revert if things
backfire on you for unexplained reasons...
then, follow these instructions...
http://www.fedora.us/wiki/LegacyRPMUpgrade
and then these...
http://www.fedoralegacy.org/docs/yum-rh9.php
then remove any and all traces of RH distributions of older postgres
versions (`rpm -qa | grep postgres`, then rpm -e xxxx), install the
latest postgres 8.1 from the RPMs on the postgres download pages, and
recreate your postgres users, and restore your postgres dump, and you
should be good to go.
