Re: [Devil-Linux-discuss] RE : Re: i485, i586, i685 ?

[Bruce S. <bw...@ar...>]

> What about the etc.tar.bz2 file ?
> 
> Is it anything different if i pass from i486 to i686?

There is another software difference you need to be aware of.  This is
assuming you're downloading and running the pre-compiled/stock releases
(as opposed to compiling them yourself).

The pre-compiled i486 and i586 releases are identical, except for the
processor selected when everything was compiled.

The pre-compiled i686-server release is almost identical to the others,
except it is compiled without grsecurity.  This is intended to run as a
"server" (Samba/DNS/PHP/Apache/Database/Mail/Proxy/FTP/...) since
grsecurity has a nasty habit of killing processes that it believes are
using too much system resources.  It's real annoying having grsecurity
randomly kill your server processes.

This is with the stock grsecurity configuration; I'm sure you could tune
grsecurity to work with a server too, but it's much easier just to leave
out grsecurity on the i686-server release.

Because of this, if you're going to ONLY use DL as a firewall, you might
want to use the i486 or i586 release, as it's slightly "harder".  If
you're going to run DL as a server, I recommend the i686-server release.
(personally I use the i686 release for everything, including firewalls,
but that's just me :)

To answer your question, the /etc/ files are identical on all releases
(just config files, no binaries there), except the i686-server release
is probably missing the config file(s) for grsecurity.  So you should be
able to go from i486 or i586 to i686-server without a problem.  But you
may run into a problem of missing grsecurity config file(s) running a
i686-server etc.tar.bz2 file any of the other releases.  

If you really want to go from i686-server to i486 or i586 and you have a
lot of customizations, you could should be able to take the grsecurity
config file(s) from a stock i486/586 etc.tar.gz2 file and manually add
them to your i686-server release before you downgrade to i586/i486.

 - BS