On Mon, 2004-09-27 at 11:07, Tobias Weisserth wrote: > > Say, how do you handle the short upgrade cycles of Fedora? Core 3 is nearing > completion and it is only a matter of time until the Core 2 lifecycle reaches > an end. Is upgrading to a newer Core release painless and can it be done > without risking the availability of the services? Any kind of upgrade, particularly version upgrades, have a certain amount of risk involved. You will risk the availability of any services running on a box when you upgrade. You can mitigate the risk by doing your homework, read all the release notes, review all critical applications and services you are running. Look through bugtraq. Read the fedora test list and archives. If possible do an upgrade to a similarly configured box that is not production. Then have a back out plan documented and tested to get you back to where you started if things go horribly wrong. Or you can roll the dice and execute an upgrade without doing any of that and hope that it goes well. I don't think an FC2 to FC3 upgrade should be that bad, definitely not as risky as FC1 to FC2 was. But there could still be some issues that have not come out that may only affect your particular hardware/package configuration. For critical production systems you may really want to consider RHEL or Whitebox Linux as they have a much longer support cycle. Otherwise you have to decide if upgrading is really worth the time, effort and risk. Just because you are still running FC1 does not mean it will stop working next week. You won't have the latest and greatest widget but then for a production system you normally don't want or need the latest and greatest. And there is nothing wrong with running an older OS and installing your own compiled versions of the latest applications such as apache, postgresql, php, etc. That way you can keep all your production services up to date and patched without having to do a massive OS upgrade. -- Scot L. Harris webid@xxxxxxxxxx Q: Why did the programmer call his mother long distance? A: Because that was her name.
