Mon, 05 Sep 2005
Poking at the fossils
Our Oracle 8 client libraries stopped working against the Oracle 10 database after upgrading to UTF-8 internal encoding. Now I am trying to upgrade some of the database clients to a newer version. I came across the following fossil:
# cat /etc/issue
Red Hat Linux release 6.2 (Zoot)
Kernel 2.2.24-6.2.3 on an i586
# free
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 15972 15648 324 0 476 6068
-/+ buffers/cache: 9104 6868
Swap: 100760 22612 78148
#
Now the problem is that newer Oracle client libraries (we need 9.2.0 at least) are linked against glibc-2.2, while RH6.2 has glibc-2.1. So the system upgrade seems to be inevitable. However, I doubt FC4 will even boot on a host with 16MB RAM. I am sure there are many stripped-down distros, but the maintainance cost would probably be lower if I simply find a better hardware.
Hmm, my first Linux box was a 386/40 with 8MB RAM running SLS Linux distribution with Linux 0.99.11 kernel. [ Insert a random I-am-so-old or current-software-is-too-bloated rant here ]