Upgrading from 7.3

Hi

I have been running RedHat 7.3 for a very long time and it has been just wonderful.  I am quite happy to stay with this build as all the things I need from linux are working well (internet access via ppp/adsl, firewall, file server to my kids, ip forwarding and masquerading (internet access for the kids), good java programming environment with eclipse and a CVS server over ssh).  

However, I am finding that a lot of new things that I would like to try and explore will not install (via rpms) because of the age of libc libc++ etc...  For instance, I had to build the jikes compiler from source yesterday because the rpm would not install :-(

So, here is the question.  How painfull would it be to ugrade to the latest version of RedHat (I don't even know that the current version is)?  It took me a long time to get printers, firewall and adsl to run properly.  Would I lose all that and have to redo them?

Also, if I have built jikes on this machine and upgrade to a later linux version, will the jikes binary still work or do I need to recompile it?

Can someone suggest a reasonable migration path?

Many thanks,
David