On 11/7/05, Jarry <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: <trim> doh, everything is trimmed. :D </trim>
Let's leave the brave, dumb, ignorance, arrogance out, and concentrate on maintaining a server, especially production servers with clients. First of all, I should point out that maintaining a server is far more than just keeping everything up to date, it is more about providing all of the clients consistent and stable services. To provide such services of such quality, down times should be kept minimal. Thus, b0rked system with no security holes mean no value to clients as they need a working system. Also, major changes should be kept minimal, some software make major configuration file changes once in a while, and that should be avoided. Having your clients to change their file/code to match your setting will leave you with unhappy clients who may just leave. System restarts, hmmm, a few times in a year is probably a lot. Some software restarts should also be avoided. For example, a webserver restart will cause all http clients to lose their session, and all the data stored in the session. There may well be important data in the session, thus doing so is just irresponsible. So now the ultimate question: when should updates by applied to the system, and what shall be applied. 1. Security fixes. Gentoo provides emerge --security, which prints out security advices based on the packages installed on your system. You should keep an eye on that, rather than upgrading everything. 2. Popular feature request. If most of you clients request MySQL 4.1 while you are running 4.0, you should probably upgrade. 3. Bug fixes. For example, a few clients run into a well known bug in PHP3, you should probably take the opportunity to upgrade it to PHP4. As to how there upgrades shall be applied: 1. Upgrades that are transparent can be applied immediately. Transparent means no configuration change, no service interruption expected. 2. Inform everyone about the upgrades that will cause down time, and give them an estimated time of when these upgrades are applied, and roughly how long the down time is expected. 3. Schedule maintenance slots. You clients should always know what to expect from you. With all the above considerations in mind, I'm pretty sure that a cron job for the updates is a brave yet not-so-bright move, and should be avoided. BTW, the above short guild is in no way official or complete, it is just my personal experience. There maybe other people who wants to amend, or there may well be special considerations from your side. -- Joe -- There are 3 kinds of people in the world: Those who can count, and those who can't. -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
