Bryce T. Pier wrote: > So I'm curious what other people are doing on the Linux platform.
If you are able to run in a virtualised environment (even in a "one on one" one virtual to one physical environment) then you may have snap-shotting. And on (Open)Solaris, I believe you can snapshot the ZFS root, and roll back as required. Be careful about rolling back. It's obvious, but I saw someone take a snapshot of a live system, whilst it was running (RedHat as it happens). After the upgrade, VMWare tools were reinstalled. This trashed the fstab (it added its own private stuff to a backup of the fstab it had taken when first installed, and therefore lost all subsequent updates). The system was rolled back. This reinstated the server (including memory state) to the live state it was in prior to patching. Unfortunately the Oracle database was on an NFS server, which wasn't rolled back and the in-core version of Oracle was out of kilter with the NFS databases. The result was an Oracle database beyond repair. Other things that have gone wrong? I have seen SLES/Yast get upset and create a mess. A recent SLES patch overwrote Exim's sendmail binary on our majordomo server with a copy of Postfix (possibly our fault). I have also seen an application (Groundwork on SLES) which installs its private library path which contains duplicates of system libraries (e.g. libcurses, off the top of my head) into /etc/ld.so.conf . When you upgrade the kernel, the SLES initramfs image ends up with calls to libraries in /usr/local which aren't there at boot time. System un-bootable. A pain to recover. Touch wood, I've never had a problem with RedHat or Ubuntu, though the roll-back issue could strike any distro. Good luck! -- Jonathan _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
