updates on production machines

[Tom H]

On Wed, Dec 8, 2010 at 6:51 AM, Matt Johnson <johnsonmlw at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> I've been following the forums for a little while and there seem to be quite a
> few 'show-stoppers' that arise when folks update their machines (remaining in
> the same release). I think I've been blasé about applying updates nightly.
> Reading the issues raised, I'm (perhaps appropriately) anxious about applying
> any updates on production machines I've got here. I've probably got the wrong
> end of the stick.
>
> Are these issues pretty rare? How do people protect against issues caused by
> updating packages?
>
> * Full back up / restore (in which case I'd modify my behaviour to only apply
> updates when I could protect the time required to perform a full restore)
>
> * Some sort of dry run or easy way to roll back?

At the very least, test in a VM before deploying.