Upgrades driving me crazy....

[n2xssvv.g02gfr12930]

On 12/11/09 10:48, Simon Andrews wrote:
> Michael Pawlowsky wrote:
>>
>> Are there any other people using FC in a production enterprise
>> environment?
> 
> Production, certainly.  We have 7 fedora servers all providing public
> facing services over a range of different functionalities.  All are
> running F11.
> 
>> The constant upgrades are driving me nuts. We have machines at
>> FC8-FC9-FC10 and FC-11.
> 
> It's a bit of a pain, but we keep all of our machines on the latest
> release (usually update a couple of weeks after the release).  We treat
> each upgrade as an opportunity to do scheduled maintainance on that
> machine and twice a year seems to work out pretty well.
> 
> 
>> The main reason we are using FC is because one it's free (in a sense).
>> The next one is that it does include more recent versions of packages
>> that we use and are looking for the latest versions to take advantage
>> of some new features and so on.
> 
> Likewise.
> 
> 
>> So basically we are in a never ending cycles of upgrades. And since we
>> have had bad experiences trying to upgrade over the last version, our
>> policy is to back up the data, re-install and put back in all the data.
> 
> We went the other way.  All of our upgrades are true upgrades over the
> last version.  We've never had a major issue when doing this (but plenty
> of minor ones - all easily fixed).  We've got at least one machine which
> has done every release since FC1, others have been added along the way.
>  Our experience has certainly been that this causes less pain (and is
> quicker) than a wipe and reinstall.
> 
> 
>> Also, I am wondering why it is not possible to simply keep upgrading
>> packages, kernel and so on, as opposed to coming up with new versions
>> every six months.
> 
> Well you can, sort of.  One of our machines has been yum updated through
> several versions.  It's a pretty minimal install, but it's had no more
> problems than the machines which did the officially supported updates.
> 
> 
>> To make things more difficult, our servers need to be up 24/7.
> 
> Surely you have scheduled downtime for any server?  We just link our
> scheduled maintainance to the dates for the Fedora updates and kill two
> birds with one stone.
> 
> 
>> Is FC simply a bad choice for enterprise production.
> 
> It depends on your priorities.  It actually works out really well for us.
> 
>> I'm starting to want to try CentOS soon. Unfortunately this will mean
>> not always being able to take advantage of the latest features in
>> software and so on.
> 
> Well that's the downside of stability.
> 
> Hope this helps
> 
> Simon.
> 

That's a remarkable upgrade feat, I managed Fedora 7 to 8 and then 10 to
11, but all the way from Fedora 1, respect. Just curious did you upgrade
your servers to fully functioning ext4? I did manage to upgrade to fully
functioning ext4 without any trouble, so it can't be that difficult
then, I'm an engineer and like things to be simple.


JB