FC3 upgrade without booting off cd

[Collins Richey]

On Thu, 11 Nov 2004 10:23:54 -0500, David Bandel <david.bandel at gmail.com> wrote:

> Well, udev is a POS. I've had to uninstall it on every system I've
> tried to use it on.  I'm either using devfs (still) or the static dev
> files.
> 

A liitle OT here, but I've had extremely few problems with udev. The
few problems that I've seen arise from the differences between devfs
and udev. Once you understand how udev works and how it is configured,
it's just run it and forget about it (about 8 months on my two
machines).

> I've never had a problem upgrading glibc on a live system.  You do
> have to know which services to restart (like SSH, Apache, and a few
> others).  But you can do it and still be running the services.  If you
> reboot to upgrade, your services are all down until after the upgrade
> is complete.  In some places I've done upgrades, this is not
> tolerable.  A reboot at the end is barely tolerable, but what could
> amount to hours offline is not.
> 
> >
> > > This is one of the nice things about Debian upgrades.  They aren't a
> > > .. OK, everything is going down for the next few hours .. deal.  Same
> > > for Gentoo.  You upgrade little by little on a daily or weekly basis
> > > and are always current.
> >
> > Yea, but you still have to reboot for a kernel change.  And if added or
> > removed udev/devfs that would be really scary trying to activate the
> > change on a live system without a reboot.
> 
> How long does it take your system to reboot?  A matter of minutes, I
> assume (2-3 max?).  This is a _lot different than being down for hours
> (or even 30 minutes).
> 
> I run an ISP.  I can afford to reboot a system once in a while (maybe
> even once a day).  But if a system goes down for even 5 minutes (much
> less 30 or more to do an upgrade), the phone calls from irate
> customers delay me even longer.
> 
> I don't risk downtimes longer than a reboot.  At least not
> deliberately.  Uptimes are not as important to me as not having
> services go down, or if they do, for _very_ short intervals.
> 

I don't run any production servers, but I wouldn't touch an upgrade
like this with a long pole on any server that I valued. I suppose I'm
old fashioned, but it's upgrade on a test server, test thoroughly,
then implement in production.

-- 
 /\/\
(CR) Collins Richey
 \/\/        "I hear you're single again." "Spouse 2.0 had fewer bugs than
              Spouse 1.0, but the maintenance ... was too much for my OS."
                  - Glitch (tm)