Status of Dapper?

[Daniel Carrera]

Alan McKinnon wrote:
>>I'm not going to reconfigure the X server over ssh. 
> 
> Why not?

For one, the user will freak out when the screen goes black. Second, 
there is no guarantee that it'll work and I need to actually be there to 
look at the monitor and verify that it worked.

> It's just another userspace program. If the new config 
> doesn't work, replace the backup xorg.conf

Easier said than done. In reality configuring X usually doesn't work the 
way you expect. It's usually not hard to trouble-shoot if you physically 
present and can see the screen. If you are there you can see X crash, 
and you can see if it has the wrong resolution, or if the image is off 
centre, or the image "looks funny". These things do happen. I have never 
once seen an upgrade that didn't require me to fiddle for a few minutes 
on a tty to get X working again.

Tell me, do you actually sell computers with Ubuntu and configure X 
through ssh?

In theory, theory and practise are the same, in practise they are not.

> The risks aren't that great. If the update breaks stuff, you'll know 
> about it before the reboot.

Things always break in an update, and you need to do a few rounds of 
updates, checks and reupgrades and perhaps a few -f upgrades to get it 
working. This isn't a problem if I'm alone with the computer, but I 
don't want the user freaking out thinking that I just turned his 
computer into a paperweight.

And what if the ssh server is what breaks? And what if the computer 
changes to a new IP when it reboots? (dynamic IP, remember). What if 
internet access breaks? The SSH server is almost guaranteed to work, but 
the other two are fairly likely.

It is easy to say that all you do is 'dist-upgrade' and it all just 
works. Reality is not like that.

I *would* use ssh if I was doing a routine update. But I wouldn't change 
from Breezy to Dapper from ssh.

>>Besides, how can I ssh to a regular user's machine? They don't get
>>static internet-facing IPs.
> 
> Is there an on-site gateway/firewall machine with a public IP? Then 
> ssh to that machine and from there ssh again to the user's machine.

"on-site gateway"? This is a guys *home*. Home pusers don't have public 
statis IPs.

Daniel.
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