To Update or Not?

[Joseph Bishay]

Hello,

Thanks for the counter-point link.

As I am a volunteer in this whole area, I would like to ask what may
be a beginner's question - how do you test the upgrades correctly?
Does this mean I need a second computer identical to my main server
(an expensive proposition) and then download/install the upgrades on
that and then run random tests on it?

Thank you
Joseph

On Thu, Oct 27, 2011 at 9:00 PM, Jeremy Bicha <jbicha at ubuntu.com> wrote:
> 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
>
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