upgrading a production server

[Paul Dwerryhouse]

On Tue, Oct 17, 2006 at 01:58:50PM -0400, John Dangler wrote:
> My workstation and laptop was running Badger, and in order to get them
> to run Dapper, I had to do a full install and manually set up the apps I
> wanted on them since dist-upgrade was a dismal failure.
> 
> I'm really nervous about an upgrade since this server is my livelihood
> as well as my testground.
> 
> Any insight or assistance is greatly appreciated.

Your best bet is to test every application that you're running on your
machines that are already upgraded to Dapper.

I've done a number of apt-get dist-upgrades of Breezy -> Dapper, and
plenty of Debian upgrades between stable releases, and have never had
any serious trouble.

The trickiest things tend to be kernel updates, especially in situations
where udev has been introduced, but I don't think the changes between
Breezy and Dapper were so severe as to cause any serious problems there.

You also don't have to do a full dist-upgrade in one hit. After running
apt-get update, run apt-get -s dist-upgrade and get a list of the
changes that will be done; you can then upgrade packages in a piecemeal
fashion with apt-get install; this way you can see what might break as
you do it.

Since this is a production server that you rely on, once you get to
Dapper, I would stay there, since it's a release with five years
support. Do you really have any compelling reason to move to Edgy?

Cheers,

Paul


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Paul Dwerryhouse				| PGP Key ID: 0x6B91B584
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A look at Ubuntu Server Edition:
http://nepotismia.com/review/ubuntu/server/6.06/