How to deal with upgrades in servers?

[Scirious]

People, how smooth is an upgrade in Mandriva? I mean, how do people running Mandriva servers deal with upgrading their production servers? If you don't upgrade what do you do at the ende o the life cicle? And for those that risky upgrading, dos it breake the system frequently?

 

Thanks,

Scirious.

[pmpatrick]

By and large, doing an upgrade install in mandriva on a production machine is risky at best, a disaster at worst, IMHO. If you search the board, you will find many that have run into problems doing an upgrade install. If you want to upgrade with mandriva, back up your data and do a fresh install.

On a production server you are probably better off with an RHEL clone like Centos with longer support cycles if you don't want to pay. An alternative would be debian stable which updates better than mandriva. Take a look at gentoo as well although I haven't used it for a while. In my experience, however, indescriminate, unthinking updates to any OS will eventually break the system. YMMV.

Edited March 6, 2006 by pmpatrick

[wilcal]

People, how smooth is an upgrade in Mandriva? I mean, how do people

running Mandriva servers deal with upgrading their production servers?

Now this may be a little convoluted and won't work for

many a folk here. First, I'm not concerned with a little

down time maybe even for a day. And some down time, an

hour or so, for testing. So given that.

 

The always on line server has a HD more then large

enough to support multiple partitions. Lets say

part1=60GB, part2=60GB, part3=20GB. part4=20GB.

 

Always part1 is the on-line and running partition

with whichever OS is in vogue at the time. In my

case today that would be Mandy 2006.0. Before that

it was Mandy LE 2005, before that 9.2 and so on

and so forth.

 

part3 and part4 are test partitions into which I'll

load the OS to be tested. Lets say for now that's

Mandy 2006.1. I can load it and tinker around with

it to make sure that this new OS really does run

on this server hardware. I have other computers that

are used to load and get smart on how the new OS works.

 

During my normal backups I mirror copy part1 -> part2

every Sunday morning. So if something bad happens

to part1 I would reboot and make active part2. I've never

had to do that.

 

But, once I have completed my testing on part3 & 4, and

am comfortable with the way the new OS works, I wipe part2

completely clean to all zeros and load the new OS into it.

I then restore all the users and public_html directory's

and make it live. So now part2 is the live production

partition. Let it run a couple days making sure things

are kool. All that while part1, the old OS is sitting

there just ready to go back on line in the time it

takes to reboot the system. Once I'm happy with the

new OS I mirror copy part2 -> part1, make part1 the active

partition, reboot and I'm on my way.

 

Tools used are:

 

http://www.killdisk.com

http://www.ranish.com/part/

 

Oh, I never upgrade. I always replace every bit and byte

starting from all zeros.

[Steve Scrimpshire]

I have been using Man(drake/driva) since 8.1 and all of my 'upgrades' have been using urpmi and only once have I run into any trouble (it had to do with naming conventions changing and it was pretty easily corrected). Now, from the things I have heard, I am in a very small minority, but I don't see how; I'm no rocket scientist. Using the urpmi method, the machine doesn't even have to be offline until you upgrade the kernel.

[ianw1974]

I've done some urpmi upgrades, some have been OK, some not so good. I normally believe in clean installations. Upgrades from CD/DVD are usually the same as using urpmi over the internet to download your upgrades.

 

I have found though, that clean installs tend to work better than upgrades. Although upgrades work, I just had some little niggles that were never there with clean installs.