Re: To Update or Not?

[Mike Biancaniello]

I try to keep all of my machines current with package updates (dist-upgrade), but am more hesitant to upgrade to newer versions.  In fact, I rarely actually upgrade the release version, instead opting for a fresh install on a new machine, migrating the data, testing, then turning off the old one.  I'm not a big fan of doing a release upgrade ... too many things change and well it just doesn't feel "clean."

Also, by keeping all of my servers on LTS releases (currently 10.04), the number of package updates is minimized.

I have some servers still running 8.04 simply because it works and I don't need any new features, etc.



From: Jeremy Bicha <jbicha at ubuntu.com>
Cc: Edubuntu Users Group <edubuntu-users at lists.ubuntu.com>
Sent: Thursday, October 27, 2011 at 9:01 pm
Subject: Re: To Update or Not?

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



--

edubuntu-users mailing list

edubuntu-users at lists.ubuntu.com

Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/edubuntu-users

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/edubuntu-users/attachments/20111027/f02218b9/attachment.html>