Squid for Fedora Core 4

Today's post is just a short note - I wish the Fedora Legacy project was still alive. As it is, it's quite difficult to update older Linux servers. There must be millions of them, for example with earlier versions of Fedora Core installed. The hardware still runs fine, the software is stable, up times can measure in years. This is good, the TCO couldn't be lower.. But if you want to update an rpm package to gain some new features you're out of luck.

Obviously one way to fix this would be to upgrade the whole server to a newer version of Linux, like CentOS 5. It's exactly this kind of forced technical migration projects that is the bread and butter of IT revenue, without providing any benefit to users. The system will be off-line for a few days, after which the IT guys will announce that (hopefully) the migration went fine, and the system is now up to date again. Users won't see the difference, but mostly have come to accept this as a given.

Sometimes you're in luck though. Today we managed to take the sources for a newer version of the Squid proxy cache, intended for Fedora Core 8, and rebuild it for Fedora Core 4.

So here's my gift for today:
squid-2.6.STABLE22-1.fc4.i386.rpm

Here is the original source package that we used:
squid-2.6.STABLE22-1.fc8.src.rpm

Let's see if we can postpone that full server upgrade for a few more years..