Ok guys the first one to laugh gets a slap OK!

A mine has a 3rd party application customised by a different 3rd party running on a an old server using red hat enterprise linux ver 2.1.

I have, so far been unable to track down media for the original software let alone the customisations of it.

Assuming I do find the installation sets what are my chances of it working on a nice clean virtual box running red hot enterprise 5.2 ?

I'd say zero.

I want to say 30%.

It would depend on what has changed between version 2.1 and version 5.2. If you were going to look I'd be inclinded to view what has changed just between v2 and v5 (as it may be easier to find that out).
My only real suggestion would be to try it, and see how much goes wrong, then decide if you want to/can fix it...

if you require a red hat clone have a look at centOS which is based on red hat enterprise and have older versions available …

http://www.centos.org/modules/tinyconte ... .php?id=15

It depends on how deeply it has its hooks into the Kernel.

There is a possibility that it will run straight away.

Thankfully, apart from system services, applications are usually self contained, so it could just be a case of backing up the application folder - and any data folders - and restore them on the new machine.

You would need to check things like the crons to see if it had any batch jobs set up to run regularly. You would also need to copy the data over. If it does have a separate config file, it should be in /etc.

Hope that helps.

Although I have seen applications create a new 'etc' folder to place application config files in, /usr/local/etc/ springs to mind...

Cheers Guys