Upgrade Advice

[Christian Campbell]

I am currently running MailScanner 8.12.8 and Spam Assassin 2.55 on a RedHat
8.0 server with Sendmail 8.12.8.  This is a production server.  I am
interested in upgrading to the most recent versions of MS and SA.  MS and SA
were installed via RPM.  Since then, I have heard that installing SA via RPM
isn't the best idea, especially when wanting to upgrade SA.  The ideal SA
installation and upgrade is building from source, from what I've gathered.

I am in the unfortunate position of running all this on a production box,
and not having an identical test box to try my upgrade out.  In addition,
this server is responsible for DNS and our Apache server.  IOW:  I can't
mess this box up.

Looking for advice as to the best way to upgrade both MS and SA.

Should I do a RPM upgrade on MS, uninstall the SA RPM and reinstall the new
version of SA from source?  Or, is there a better way to go about this?
Does it matter which order I do this in?

In addition, over time, more spam seems to not be tagged.  I assume that
with each release of SA, the SA rulebase is updated, and there will be a
better chance of catching more spam?  If that's the case, is there a way to
update the SA rules without upgrading?  Or, is a rule update the same as
upgrading?

Looking for suggestions.  Pardon my ignorance...MS and SA are still pretty
new to me.

Thanks in advance,

Christian


Christian P. Campbell
Systems Engineer
Information Technology Department
Bruegger's Enterprises, Inc.
Desk: (802) 652-9270
Cell: (802) 734-5023
Email: ccampbell at brueggers dot com
Registered Linux User #319324

PGP public key available via PGP keyservers
or http://www2.brueggers.com/pgp/ccampbell.html

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