fedora-it community site on Ubuntu server

[Jon Masters]

On Tue, 2011-01-11 at 08:35 +0100, Ralf Corsepius wrote:
> On 01/11/2011 08:21 AM, Jon Masters wrote:

> > there are far too many of them, and the churn is high.
> Makes me wonder how I manage to keep my servers alive ;)

Because you are doing manual updates and customizing the install :)

> Seriously: As first step, I usually try to slim down server 
> installations to the "absolutely required minimum" - This alone keeps 
> off a lot of the churn and of the potential breakage.

This is a good idea. I would also remove a lot of bits from a server
install. I generally add a large number of wildcard exclude items to my
yum config covering a few particular sets of packages I don't want to
use either. But that's not an "out of the box" experience :)

> Also, I don't "automatically install updates", but am installing them 
> during "manual maintenance". I am experiencing occasional issues with 
> updates, but am rarely experiencing serious ones.

I would also do the same on a server, but this is not practical for a
real world deployment. It's fun at home, on a personal colo box, or for
a small number of non-critical machines. It is not, however, fine for
something you need to just be able to update on the fly. I personally
also never do distribution upgrades to new releases. I only re-install
from scratch, which affords me a convenient set of backup disks, and
avoids the kinds of problems I've had in three different releases.

> All in all, in reality, the updates aren't much of a problem.

I disagree. As it stands, the only machine I have automatically
deploying updates is my dedicated rawhide netbook, which I expect to
break randomly (that's why I bought it). But we've done this before.

Jon.