[ale] Red Hat upgrades?

[Jim Kinney]

James,

You _still_ don't get it!! RHEL was NOT written for IT. It was designed for
pointy-haired boss types that think "stability" is a version number. The
build new box with new major release, port code, suffer during QA is what
_they(phb)_ understand.

I run RHEL systems for things I want to not look at or touch for the next 5
years. auto-security-patch-n-bug-fix only. For the stuff I _use_, I use
Fedora.

I have one system that I've meticulously upgraded from about fedora 2 or so
(first mostly working 64-bit release) through F14. It works because they
have the mentality to have it work. RHEL is a different animal entirely.
Fedora is pretty close to rolling upgrades. And as Michael has said, their
releases are rock-solid stable (stay out of the rawhide arena unless you
like bleeding edge or it's real close to release time!).

On Tue, Jul 5, 2011 at 6:45 PM, James Sumners <james.sumners at gmail.com>wrote:

> On Tue, Jul 5, 2011 at 6:12 PM, Michael H. Warfield <mhw at wittsend.com>
> wrote:
> > Now mind you, I work with (not for) an IT department for a major
> > international company that have taken that attitude at times that left
> > them sitting on Solaris 8, in some cases, for ages because the upgrades
> > are so painful (switching from Solaris to RHEL was less painful than
> > Solaris 8 to Solaris 10).  RHEL 5 to RHEL 6 takes hours of downtime and
> > adapting.  I did it in my VM's from CentOS 4 to CentOS 5.  You know what
> > the "upgrade" path is?  You provision an entirely new VM and build it
> > and migrate your data.  And it takes hours of work for one machine...
> > Man!  Virtualization makes that work sooo much easier, and yet...  Net
> > time, an upgrade from RHEL 4 to RHEL 5 for a major data center can take
> > weeks and involve a lot of people depending on the number of servers.
> > Slowlaris -- forget it.  Solaris 11 and ZFS has the right idea.  They
> > can do live backup snapshots and upgrades and they can roll forward and
> > backward.  We're not quite there yet.  Getting closer...  I don't say
> > these things because I have not experienced them.  I have been there and
> > done that.  I'm sorry.  I'm just too bloody lazy to work that hard.
> >
> > Now, lets see...  Every six to 12 months upgrading...  Oh, interesting,
> > I can type (cut-n-paste) 6 commands into 30 or 40 windows one right
> > after the other remotely turning them loose in maybe 15 minutes if I'm
> > really slow.  Oh, wow.  I use a package cacher (pkg-cacher) so it only
> > downloads the big stuff once.  Oh wow...  30 servers are done in under
> > an hour (after the first one) and not a single error and the down time
> > for them is less that 5 minutes each?
> >
> > Really?
> >
> > Really.
> >
> > Yes there can be gotcha's, particularly if you are a Postgresql fanatic
> > like I am.  If I do a version upgrade I do need to backup and dump the
> > databases and restore.  Oh well...  You learn and you do and you SCRIPT.
> > Yes, it helps if you keep your servers in coherence and they have the
> > same set of rpms (I try - Fedora is easier there too).  Yes, you
> > sometimes have to resolve some conflicts but then you have this dump of
> > your databases and you can cut-n-paste the uninstalls between all the
> > machines just as fast.  I can do 30 machines using yum and have them all
> > up in running in less than the down time of a RHEL single server upgrade
> > when they go to to a "major upgrade".
> >
> > I can live with that every 6 to 12 months.  And I laugh my ass off at my
> > IT people that complain that the server is going to be down for 12 hours
> > for an upgrade (just because they can not predict what's going to break
> > or how long it will take to fix it)...
> >
> > You guys work too hard and I'm a lazy bastard with better things to do.
> > Fedora works for me.
> >
> >> -L
> >
> > Regards,
> > Mike
>
> I'm glad someone with a bigger resume than me gets it. All of this "no
> upgrades between major versions means stability" garbage is merely a
> justification for accepting a broken system (in my opinion). Like you,
> I don't enjoy wasting hours of my time rebuilding ONE system and then
> doing the same for the other X number of systems.
>
> I just wish companies that say they "support Linux" didn't really mean
> they "support Red Hat."
>
> You mentioned that Fedora has gained the equivalent of `apt-get
> dist-upgrade`. Does it also have the equivalent of `echo "postgresql
> hold" | dpkg --set-selections` [1]? That would certainly help in your
> upgrades when you know a package is going to require extra work.
>
> [1] --
> http://www.debianadmin.com/how-to-prevent-a-package-from-being-updated-in-debian.html
>
>
> --
> 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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