After upgrading my linux server from Redhat 7.1 to Rehat 8.0, I have come across some gotchas. I am making a list of them in case they are useful to others who also want to install Redhat 8.0 Forward this to people who might find it helpful (like maybe the webteam?). Anyone not using linux or having any plans to do so can safely delete this message. Apache and PHP didn't seem to work out of the box in 8.0. Actually PHP does work, but I've been lazy and have used the short version of the tags (). Redhat 8.0 uses Apache 2.0 which by default does not process the short version. So not even a phpinfo() would work until I used the long version of the tags (). If you have this situation you can avoid changing your scripts by editing /etc/php.ini and changing the file: Short_open_tag = Off to Short_open_tag = On Some scripts that use that register global variables may not work. As of PHP 4.2.0, the default in the configs for register_globals was changed to off. This was done because it can be a security hazard if you don't validate the input data. Fortunately, I did consider this in my scripts. If you don't want to change such scripts you can change the value in /etc/php.ini from register_globals = Off to register_globals = On In Redhat 7.1 Postgres 7.2.1 was included and it's default permissions in /var/lib/pgsql/data/pg_hba.conf were: # By default, allow anything over UNIX domain sockets and localhost. local all trust host all 127.0.0.1 255.255.255.255 trust In Redhat 8.0 Postgres 7.2.2 was included and it's default permissions in /var/lib/pgsql/data/pg_hba.conf are: local all ident sameuser There are good comments in the file that explain what this pg_hba.conf does. In essence they've tightened security from any connection from the local machine to where you can only connect to a database with the same username, expect for the postgres user. So if you do the command "psql -U postgres -d template1", this will work for the postgres unix account, but not even root! So you might want some level of security in between. With Postgres 7.2.1 with the default configuration the connection host could be specified as localhost with no problem. With Postgres 7.2.2 if you specify ANY host, even localhost you will get your connection refused. Either don't use any host in your connection string to the database or start postmaster with the -i flag with makes postgres listen for TCP socket connections as well as local sockets. To change the -i flag, i you can change the startup script /etc/rc.d/init.d/postgresql and change the line su -l postgres -s /bin/sh -c "/usr/bin/pg_ctl -D $PGDATA -p /usr/bin/postmaster start > /dev/null 2>&1" < /dev/null to su -l postgres -s /bin/sh -c "/usr/bin/pg_ctl -D $PGDATA -p /usr/bin/postmaster -o -i start > /dev/null 2>&1" < /dev/null You may have further gotchas in Apache configs since the change from the 1.3 tree to the 2.0 version tree is pretty big.