To Update or Not?

[Jeremy Bicha]

On 27 October 2011 20:43, Joseph Bishay <joseph.bishay at gmail.com> wrote:
> So I came across this article and wondered if it applied to Edubuntu:
>
> http://www.zdnet.com/blog/diy-it/why-ive-finally-had-it-with-my-linux-server-and-im-moving-back-to-windows/245
>
> The gist of the rant is that Linux servers are rather unstable because
> any upgrade can kill the server, and therefore you should NOT be
> updating your machine once it's running perfectly.
>
> I get a notice about different packages having available upgrades on
> our production LTSP server at least once a week and for the most part
> I always do so -- is this going to suddenly result in a
> similiarly-described situation?  Should I turn off all updates?

You should probably read the counterpoint by the ZDNet Linux editor:
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/open-source/linux-servers-work-just-fine/9793

Yes, if you don't know what you're doing, you can break your system
pretty badly. And worse, if you don't know how to recover or don't
have good backups, you can easily get yourself in a world of trouble.
Updates to stable releases do get a week of testing before being
pushed from -proposed to -updates. But you definitely should test full
upgrades (like from 11.04 to 11.10) before deploying as hardware
support unfortunately varies from release to release.

I strongly recommend that you not disable security updates and I
recommend reading the changelog entries (if using Update Manager,
click Description of Update). Non-security updates are supposed to fix
bugs so they should be more beneficial than harmful but I suppose it
depends on how risk-averse you are.

Jeremy Bicha