On 2015-01-07 13:47, Alan McKinnon wrote:
On 07/01/2015 13:52, Stefan G. Weichinger wrote:
I am in the process of upgrading an old (~2010) gentoo server.
The customer never wanted updates ... and now he wants ... *sigh*
Don't waste your time (you are already experiencing the full reason
why).
Backup data and configs, reinstall Gentoo, restore data and configs.
Downtime? Of course. A few hours. Customer needs to understand he
brought this upon himself.
Trying to do it in-place will likely takes *days* and fill you with
pain
and mucho downtime. This list, the forum, and planet are full of horror
stories of what it takes to do it and the issues you will run into.
Frankly, you do not need to prove you can do it (we know you can), and
you have much better things to do with your time (like proper billable
hours).
It's worth repeating: the customer caused this, he must now feel the
pain and not you.
Strange, I only have successful stories with upgrading old gentoo
machines. If you have a machine which you update regularly then you know
all the issues during the time and so upgrading "per partes" leads to no
surprises but the same challenges you've handled before. But yes, it
takes time.
Moreover, if you use configuration management like Ansible, you can even
automatically merge changes when applications ship new configuration.
