Hi Scot, On Tuesday, 28. September 2004 00:01, Scot L. Harris wrote: > 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. Sounds fair enough :-) I'll evaluate what's most useful in the long run and then we'll see. Thank, Tobias
