Case for an occasional system refresh or clean install

[Tim]

Allegedly, on or about 18 June 2014, Temlakos sent:
> Bottom line: everyone who administers a Fedora system, should do a 
> "clean install" or an effective system refresh (reinstalling the OS and 
> all apps on a system having a separate /home partition) at least, I 
> would say, once for every three new versions of Fedora. The "fedup" app 
> lets too many minor faults accumulate in a system over time. Result: you 
> are cheating yourself and your users of a good user experience.

I'd done upgrades in the past, and always found them painful.  Firstly,
there was the huge delay, as it churned through what you had installed,
to work out what to put into the upgrade.  Then there was the left-overs
that caused problems with the new system (old, incompatible
configuration files, abandoned packages, conflicting packages, etc.),
that took longer to sort out than backing up old settings, installing
fresh, and carefully implementing their configurations into the new
updated versions.

If I ran databases, I might be more inclined to try upgrading rather
than fresh installs.  But my current circumstances say that it's easier
to do fresh installs.

> But I decided to put F20 on another machine I had intended to replace. 
> (It was a video-capture machine

I'd be interested to know what you use for that (software and hardware).
I've yet to find anything that isn't painful, or actually works.

> I learned later that the old machine had been providing a crutch for 
> samba connectivity to other machines on the network. When I retired the 
> old machine, I lost that. Temporarily. I had to relearn everything I'd 
> learned and forgotten about configuring samba by directly editing the 
> smb.conf file. But now I have two machines--a desktop and a laptop--that 
> can establish samba connectivity independently.

Computers running SMB elect a browser master amongst themselves,
according to some algorithm - that may be buried in sourcecode, but I
haven't seen explained in precise detail - that takes into account
things like fastest, strongest, machine that's been running for the
longest uptime, to be the master.  When machines go offline, there may
be a reconsideration of who to be the master, and that can make SMB
unresponsive for up to quarter of an hour (great design, that,
especially as they don't seem to have the concept of gracefully going
offline - i.e. logging off/announcing that they're leaving, everything
else times out trying to contact the missing computer).  If the browse
master goes offline, that can really throw things into a spin.
Sometimes the quickest way to force a re-election is to restart SMB on
all of them (not really possible if one of them is Windows, rather than
Samba, as it doesn't give you an interface to do that).

Although the Samba config does let you try to influence a client to be
the browse master, it's still up to all the others as to what really
happens.  If you have an actual Windows machine on the LAN, it can be
very hard to get something else to be the browser master.  It can be
easier to go the other way, and configure each Samba machine that you
don't want to be a browse master, to be lesser machines that shouldn't
be considered for the role.

I hate the sodding protocol.  These days it stays disabled unless I have
to let a Windows machine share files over the network.  And I'm more
inclined to try and put NFS onto the Windows machine than play SMB
shenanigans.  That, or just FTP/HTTP/USB-discdrive files across.

-- 
[tim at localhost ~]$ uname -rsvp
Linux 3.9.10-100.fc17.x86_64 #1 SMP Sun Jul 14 01:31:27 UTC 2013 x86_64

All mail to my mailbox is automatically deleted, there is no point
trying to privately email me, I will only read messages posted to the
public lists.

George Orwell's '1984' was supposed to be a warning against tyranny, not
a set of instructions for supposedly democratic governments.