On 26 Aug 2011, Ralph Becker-Szendy stated: > One problem is upgrades. If your whole household and family rely on the > server, you can't take it out of service for a weekend to upgrade the > OS. And OBSD wants to be upgraded every 6 months, otherwise you are > looking at a reinstall. Right now, I'm doing a leapfrog technique: > About once a year, I rsync my Soekris to a whitebox server, quickly (2-3 > hours) swap them, then have a week to do a thorough install/ improve > cycle. But if you get busy, that week turns into a month and then a > year; right now I'm in that year, and going to restart with a 2GB 6501.
An alternative approach is to maintain the primary OS image (everything but variable parts of /var and any network-mounted filesystems) in a chroot or other jail on another (bigger) machine, and rsync it over nightly in a cron job (or on demand, if you've just done a security upgrade or something). It takes a little work to autorestart affected services after the rsync, but not very much (if you even want to bother with that, as most daemons don't care if their binary image is replaced underneath them). This makes it completely trivial to recover on flash failure: just slam the image onto it. You *know* it's up to date -- it can never get out of date. This is really easy with one of the BSDs or a source-based Linux distro and much more unpleasant with a Linux-based binary package manager. -- NULL && (void) _______________________________________________ Soekris-tech mailing list [email protected] http://lists.soekris.com/mailman/listinfo/soekris-tech
