How did that strategy of patching Red Hat 7.1 work out?

• Turns out no one gets a medal for running a very old distro very long :)

• Making new RPMs to update a distribution from the last millennium was not a long term strategy, even if it worked for over 10 years.

• We needed something new.

• But doing an upgrade to a new distribution over 10 years later is scary.

• Very scary!

• Oh, and preferably on live machines without rebooting them :) (we reboot for kernel upgrades, but that happens asynchronously)