Upgrading Cpanel from WICKED OLD version. Advice? Stumbling Blocks?

Hello,

I work for a university that set up a CPanel box a while ago for professors and staff to use for various projects, but has largely left it alone. The result is a way out of date version of CPanel that I would like to upgrade.

It is currently running WHM 10.0.0 and CPanel 10.0.0 -r85 and Redhat 9.

My question is, what problems have people run into when clicking the upgrade button that we should be prepared for? We have a test box running RHEL 3 and the latest versions of whm/cpanel (installed from scratch a few weeks ago) and when I clicked update, by examinging the log I figure it does the following things:

1. Updates /scripts...

2. Checks various apps:
- PHP
- FTP
- Exim (maildir)
- MySQL
- bandmin
- courier-authlib
- courier-imap
- portsentry

3. runs Redhat up2date

4. Updates CPAN Perl Modules

5. Updates CPANEL
- Updates every installed "addon"


Other than general tips - I have a few specific questions. The Fedora legacy project keeps a much better repository of updates for Redhat 9, if I were to install yum and point it to the Fedora legacy project, would Cpanel know to use it?

My second question is about apache - in what phase of the update process is apache updated, if at all?

Thank you in advance for your help and expertise,
- Geddes

 

Thanks Chirpy! That was a very helpful reply. Thanks for sacrificing your time to help out on these forums. I had heard that upcp would break custom apache modules, and after running upcp an apache recompile, or at least editing of httpd.conf if the module was dynamically loaded, was neccessary. does what you are saying - that upcp does not update apache - also mean that I can safely build a custom apache module and let cpanel autoupdate without fear that this module will break?

Thanks again - you've already been a great help. How do you know cpanel so well?

EDIT -- I think I figured this out - it isn't the upcp process that will kill apache custom modules, but the cpanel built in apache updating feature that will kill them. Understood.