How I updated SuSE

I inherited an ancient SuSE 7.2 machine to administer and decided to update it because the previous administrator hadn’t bothered with it. These were just security updates. I started with YaST, the official package manager for SuSE. Spoiled by Debian, I began looking for something better, preferably on the command line. I found it! It’s called fou4s and it’s like Debian’s dpkg, though miles from it, as I later found out. So I typed the one command I should never have typed. The packages started downloading and everything looked fine. There were no version changes except the security versions, so you’d think everything would be all right and run as it should. After the download, fou4s started installing. When it finished, I decided to reboot the box. For context, this computer connects three villages to the internet. Everything seemed to go as it should. I logged in and started finding out what wasn’t running. The routing table was screwed up, and worse, Apache wasn’t running! Pardon my language, but that was a shitshow: it hosts about twenty websites. Long story short, after trying to downgrade packages via the Apache SRPM, I ended up installing Debian on the machine. Apache had simply fallen over and stayed down because of the libc libraries. So dear old fou4s cost me two sleepless nights. I’ve been biased against SuSE ever since. It turns out the previous administrator knew full well why not to install security updates and why to get paid for work he wasn’t doing. I now know I won’t recommend SuSE to anyone, except Nazis with money to burn and not enough brains to read a how-to. On the other hand, I’m not saying Debian is a cure-all. But administering the machine has been trouble-free ever since :).