Recently I came across a blog posting of Dominik who blogs at banym.de. In his article he mentioned that he keeps the installation CDs of all the old Linux distributions to make sure he can generate the old filesystem versions. As an old sysadmin, I disagree a little with that, because even recent filesystem tools have compatibility options implemented.

But from a binary juggler’s view, he is right to keep the old media kits or at least archive the data to be able to have some packages for fixing the system if needed. But regarding the filesystems, I prefer to rely on the compatibility parameters. But does it always need to be the old kernel? There are a few older kernel versions still maintained and having a lot of backports and fixes. So the userland is pretty much the same, but the kernel is fixed.

And if you ask me: As long as the toolchain is intact, it shouldn’t be a problem to get the system in a good shape. The compiler doesn’t bite.