[ale] Red Hat upgrades?

[Jim Kinney]

On Fri, Jul 1, 2011 at 11:25 AM, James Sumners <james.sumners at gmail.com>wrote:

> 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."
>

If my end goal is RHEL6, and I understand that RHEL6 is quite different from
RHEL5 in security areas, I would forgo the intermediate step to RHEL5. Time
permitting, I would also work to automate the installation of the
complicated app that runs on the stack. Maybe not so far as to package it
into an rpm (although would allow certain OS-level options like rollbacks to
previous version), but at least some auto-installing tarball stuff.

>
>
> --
> 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
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-- 
-- 
James P. Kinney III

As long as the general population is passive, apathetic, diverted to
consumerism or hatred of the vulnerable, then the powerful can do as they
please, and those who survive will be left to contemplate the outcome.
- *2011 Noam Chomsky

http://heretothereideas.blogspot.com/
*
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