Proposed F19 Feature: Fedora Upgrade - using yum

[Chris Murphy]

On Jan 26, 2013, at 10:45 AM, Mike Pinkerton <pselists at mindspring.com> wrote:
> 
> If a fedup upgrade can go offline for a lengthy, but uncertain, amount of time, then the lack of feedback is worrying.  You can't hold your breath for 25 minutes, you don't know when to conclude that you have a serious problem that will require help from the data center staff, and you don't have any idea where the process went off-track.

I think the lack of feedback with fedup is a known weak area that needs improvement. I found that by deleting 'quiet rhgb' and adding one of the debug options to the fedup kenel at reboot time, I can get to a shell during the upgrade, and issue a:

journalcti --follow

And I get live updates throughout the process. I don't recall "hang" without some sort of feedback for more than maybe 5 minutes. I forget off hand if top and/or ps are available, I think at least one of them is.

> If you could SSH into fedup during its "offline" period and get real time feedback about what it is doing and any errors it encounters, and perhaps the ability to fix any problems when it finishes but before it attempts to reboot, then it would be less scary for remote upgrades.

I haven't tried 'systemctl start sshd' during the upgrade to see what happens; it's probably not totally benign to do this, since ssh will be upgraded, but it seems a lot safer, vastly so, than a live yum update while a server is running.

I don't know any company that allows major upgrades without user processes being required to quit. Apple and Microsoft both download and stage their upgrades, no user processes allowed, a partially upgraded system reboots, completes the primary upgrade tasks before user sessions are allowed again (and Windows might have one more reboot, I forget).

Once upon a time, Apple allows user session to stay live during the installation of minor system software updates. They don't even do this anymore. Apparently it was so fraught with peril. So now, the download occurs in the background during the user session, and you have the option to being the install which also requires a restart. If you agree, you're logged out, user processes quit, the update begins, the system reboots.

I just don't see how it's best practices to be doing updates on live processes. This seems sorta like a game to find out just how much one can cheat the upgrade process before the ship will in fact sink.

Chris Murphy