Date: Wed, 4 Jun 2008 10:43:27 -1000 From: Clifton Royston <cliftonr@lava.net> To: Doug Barton <dougb@FreeBSD.org> Cc: Jo Rhett <jrhett@netconsonance.com>, FreeBSD Stable <freebsd-stable@freebsd.org> Subject: Re: challenge: end of life for 6.2 is premature with buggy 6.3 Message-ID: <20080604204325.GD4701@lava.net> In-Reply-To: <4846D849.2090005@FreeBSD.org> References: <9B7FE91B-9C2E-4732-866C-930AC6022A40@netconsonance.com> <4846D849.2090005@FreeBSD.org>
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On Wed, Jun 04, 2008 at 11:00:41AM -0700, Doug Barton wrote:
> Jo Rhett wrote:
...
> >But given that 6.3 is still experiencing bugs with things that
> >are working fine and stable in 6.2, this is a pretty hard case to make.
>
> I admit to not having been following 6.x too closely, but are these
> things that have been reported, or problems you're having personally?
Speaking just for myself, I'd love to get a general response from
people who have run servers on both as to whether 6.3 is on average
more stable than 6.2. I really haven't gotten any clear impression as
to this, either from posts on -hackers or -stable, and I believe I
asked a couple times. I've seen comments that 6.3 should be
considerably more stable than 6.2, but also complaints about bugs such
as Jo is commenting on, and I have not seen much committed in the way
of errata fixes for 6.3 since its release.
I'd love to pick up some more stability, but I'm feeling a little
burned by 6.2 relative to 4.10, and thus twice wary.
> >This is also a fairly significant investment in terms of time and money
> >for any business to handle this ugprade.
>
> Having an upgrade path is something every operation needs. "Set it and
> forget it" isn't a viable strategy in the current culture where 0-day
> vulnerabilities are becoming increasingly common.
Fair enough.
Now I must confess my ignorance; is there a simplest straightforward
way to upgrade multiple servers between releases in the same branch,
other than rebuilding each from source, or wiping and reinstalling? In
the past I've always done one of those two.
For example, if I take a 6.3R CD, or build one for 6-RELENG, is there
a way to do an "upgrade in place" on each server? Or would it work
better to do a build from recent source on the development server, then
export /usr/src and /usr/obj via NFS to the production servers and do
the usual "make installkernel; reboot;" etc. sequence on them? (In my
case I do have all machines on one GigE switch.)
-- Clifton
--
Clifton Royston -- cliftonr@iandicomputing.com / cliftonr@lava.net
President - I and I Computing * http://www.iandicomputing.com/
Custom programming, network design, systems and network consulting services
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