And you can be even *more* relaxed about keeping up with updates if you're running a server that doesn't have a public ip address....which may be the case for most of us running ltsp servers. In fact, I only do updates when I have time to fix anything that breaks.
I have definitely had horrible things happen with updates that took me days to resolve. So, while I don't have 2 identical servers, I do have 2 computers...and I have 2 hard drives in each one. It's wise to clonezilla your working server to a second harddrive *before* doing version updates. And I also stick to lts versions because they're designed to be less experimental and more stable. Perhaps the wisest thing I've done is write a script that can automatically rebuild my chroots. That way when a chroot update fails, I can rebuild with a simple command. -peter On Fri, Oct 28, 2011 at 8:07 AM, Joseph Bishay <[email protected]>wrote: > Hello, > > Thanks for the counter-point link. > > As I am a volunteer in this whole area, I would like to ask what may > be a beginner's question - how do you test the upgrades correctly? > Does this mean I need a second computer identical to my main server > (an expensive proposition) and then download/install the upgrades on > that and then run random tests on it? > > Thank you > Joseph > > On Thu, Oct 27, 2011 at 9:00 PM, Jeremy Bicha <[email protected]> wrote: > > On 27 October 2011 20:43, Joseph Bishay <[email protected]> wrote: > >> So I came across this article and wondered if it applied to Edubuntu: > >> > >> > http://www.zdnet.com/blog/diy-it/why-ive-finally-had-it-with-my-linux-server-and-im-moving-back-to-windows/245 > >> > >> The gist of the rant is that Linux servers are rather unstable because > >> any upgrade can kill the server, and therefore you should NOT be > >> updating your machine once it's running perfectly. > >> > >> I get a notice about different packages having available upgrades on > >> our production LTSP server at least once a week and for the most part > >> I always do so -- is this going to suddenly result in a > >> similiarly-described situation? Should I turn off all updates? > > > > You should probably read the counterpoint by the ZDNet Linux editor: > > http://www.zdnet.com/blog/open-source/linux-servers-work-just-fine/9793 > > > > Yes, if you don't know what you're doing, you can break your system > > pretty badly. And worse, if you don't know how to recover or don't > > have good backups, you can easily get yourself in a world of trouble. > > Updates to stable releases do get a week of testing before being > > pushed from -proposed to -updates. But you definitely should test full > > upgrades (like from 11.04 to 11.10) before deploying as hardware > > support unfortunately varies from release to release. > > > > I strongly recommend that you not disable security updates and I > > recommend reading the changelog entries (if using Update Manager, > > click Description of Update). Non-security updates are supposed to fix > > bugs so they should be more beneficial than harmful but I suppose it > > depends on how risk-averse you are. > > > > Jeremy Bicha > > > > -- > > edubuntu-users mailing list > > [email protected] > > Modify settings or unsubscribe at: > https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/edubuntu-users > > > > -- > edubuntu-users mailing list > [email protected] > Modify settings or unsubscribe at: > https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/edubuntu-users >
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