To Update or Not?

[Peter k]

And you can be even *more* relaxed about keeping up with updates if you're
running a server that doesn't have a public ip address....which may be the
case for most of us running ltsp servers. In fact, I only do updates when I
have time to fix anything that breaks.

I have definitely had horrible things happen with updates that took me days
to resolve. So, while I don't have 2 identical servers, I do have 2
computers...and I have 2 hard drives in each one. It's wise to clonezilla
your working server to a second harddrive *before* doing version updates.
And I also stick to lts versions because they're designed to be less
experimental and more stable.

Perhaps the wisest thing I've done is write a script that can automatically
rebuild my chroots. That way when a chroot update fails, I can rebuild with
a simple command.
-peter

On Fri, Oct 28, 2011 at 8:07 AM, Joseph Bishay <joseph.bishay at gmail.com>wrote:

> 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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