Upgrading GLIBC 2.2 to 2.3

Greetings. I have a been running a REdhat 7.3 box since about 2002-ish, and while it's far from stock (including a newer kernel, 2.4.20-20.7, which I hope will eliminate any "kernel too old" issues.) One thing this system sorely needs is an upgrade in glibc. I'm running the newest version that was available for RH 7.3 for some time now (2.2.5-44), and after some searching on google groups it sems like an iffy proposition.

Nevertheless, I really would like to get this upgraded to 2.3; I've been able to get away with just compiling things instead of RPMs (something every linux-unix user should able to do imho), but in the recent month, I'm finding more and more src tar balls that want 2.3, when before this was only an issue with newer RPMs.

And no, I really do not want to upgrade to a newer distro, I've put so much work int o7.3, and ot be honest, I have something of a love affair with it :) It's a good solid distro that just needs this bit of maintance to make able to run newer programs.

Thanks for any help. Info on my system and current glibc below. Any other info available upon request.

# uname -a Linux ***** 2.4.20-20.7 #1 Mon Aug 18 14:56:30 EDT 2003 i686 unknown

# rpm -qa egrep '^glibc' glibc-devel-2.2.5-44 glibc-utils-2.2.5-44 glibc-debug-2.2.5-44 glibc-kernheaders-2.4-7.16 glibc-debug-static-2.2.5-44 glibc-2.2.5-44 glibc-common-2.2.5-44

-- Stan