[ale] Red Hat upgrades?

[James Sumners]

On Fri, Jul 1, 2011 at 11:13 AM, Jim Kinney <jim.kinney at gmail.com> wrote:
> Additionally, from a professional admin standpoint, I find it to be bad
> practice to be upgrading a production system to a new set of libs. By
> definition, a production system is not eligible for an upgrade. It is only
> allowed security and bug fix patches. To perform an OS upgrade is to change
> a production system into a test system which must then pass QA before
> becoming. So from that standpoint, it doesn't matter if a particular OS
> support rolling upgrades or not, the professional admin best practices are
> to put new code on new system, test, QA, promote to production, verify again
> and then roll old production machine to test status for the next cycle.

The VM I intend to change is not accessible by anyone other than
myself and those who I allow by IP. It's one of a cluster of five.
Since this application is such a pain to deal with in one install,
maintaining a "production" and "test" environment just isn't worth it.
So I keep one of the "production" installs reserved for "testing."

I do have a test environment, but I only use it when I need to test
something that would affect all servers in the cluster. E.g. testing
to see if this stupid application can handle Tomcat session
replication (which it couldn't).

This being a VM, going back to a known working state is simple -- just
restore the snapshot.

It sounds like the answer to my original question is "upgrade to 5
first and then to 6."


-- 
James Sumners
http://james.roomfullofmirrors.com/

"All governments suffer a recurring problem: Power attracts
pathological personalities. It is not that power corrupts but that it
is magnetic to the corruptible. Such people have a tendency to become
drunk on violence, a condition to which they are quickly addicted."

Missionaria Protectiva, Text QIV (decto)
CH:D 59