Fedora Core 2 AMD 64 Bit: good platform for heavy load mail server?

Tobias Weisserth fedora-lists at weisserth.net
Mon Sep 27 22:16:27 UTC 2004


Hi Scot,

On Tuesday, 28. September 2004 00:01, Scot L. Harris wrote:
> On Mon, 2004-09-27 at 11:07, Tobias Weisserth wrote:
> > Say, how do you handle the short upgrade cycles of Fedora? Core 3 is
> > nearing completion and it is only a matter of time until the Core 2
> > lifecycle reaches an end. Is upgrading to a newer Core release painless
> > and can it be done without risking the availability of the services?
>
> Any kind of upgrade, particularly version upgrades, have a certain
> amount of risk involved.  You will risk the availability of any services
> running on a box when you upgrade.  You can mitigate the risk by doing
> your homework, read all the release notes, review all critical
> applications and services you are running.  Look through bugtraq.  Read
> the fedora test list and archives.  If possible do an upgrade to a
> similarly configured box that is not production.  Then have a back out
> plan documented and tested to get you back to where you started if
> things go horribly wrong.
>
> Or you can roll the dice and execute an upgrade without doing any of
> that and hope that it goes well.  I don't think an FC2 to FC3 upgrade
> should be that bad, definitely not as risky as FC1 to FC2 was.  But
> there could still be some issues that have not come out that may only
> affect your particular hardware/package configuration.
>
> For critical production systems you may really want to consider RHEL or
> Whitebox Linux as they have a much longer support cycle.  Otherwise you
> have to decide if upgrading is really worth the time, effort and risk.
> Just because you are still running FC1 does not mean it will stop
> working next week.  You won't have the latest and greatest widget but
> then for a production system you normally don't want or need the latest
> and greatest.
>
> And there is nothing wrong with running an older OS and installing your
> own compiled versions of the latest applications such as apache,
> postgresql, php, etc.  That way you can keep all your production
> services up to date and patched without having to do a massive OS
> upgrade.

Sounds fair enough :-)

I'll evaluate what's most useful in the long run and then we'll see.

Thank,
Tobias




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