From owner-freebsd-stable Wed Dec 8 8:19:42 1999 Delivered-To: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org Received: from pooh.elsevier.nl (pooh.elsevier.nl [145.36.9.32]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id D473B14BD4 for ; Wed, 8 Dec 1999 08:19:33 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from steve@pooh.elsevier.nl) Received: (from steve@localhost) by pooh.elsevier.nl (8.9.3/8.9.3) id QAA00773; Wed, 8 Dec 1999 16:20:23 GMT (envelope-from steve) Message-ID: X-Mailer: XFMail 1.4.0 on FreeBSD X-Priority: 3 (Normal) Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit MIME-Version: 1.0 In-Reply-To: <199912081601.IAA52774@pau-amma.whistle.com> Date: Wed, 08 Dec 1999 16:20:22 -0000 (GMT) From: "Steve O'Hara-Smith" To: David Wolfskill Subject: RE: is -STABLE really stable? Cc: freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG Sender: owner-freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG On 08-Dec-99 David Wolfskill wrote: >>From: "Sameer R. Manek" >>Date: Tue, 7 Dec 1999 21:05:38 -0800 > Unless I'm confused rather more than is usual -- which is by no means > especially unlikely -- that also assumes that the "spare box" hardware is > sufficiently close to that of the "production systems" that the resulting > system can be tested with sufficient confidence (for some value of > "sufficient") that the results will apply to the production system -- or, > better yet, that the "spare box" can actually *become* the (new) > "production system". (Then the just-retired system becomes the "spare > box"... after sufficient burn-in....) Indeed the latter scenario is ideal (ideal is that the spare box and the production box are identical). > Of course, this also presumes that the sysadmin(s) can tell when one set > of hardware is "sufficiently close" to some other (sometimes arbitrary) > set of hardware, which is certainly not the case with my dealings with > PC hardware. :-( Others may well have different perspectives, certainly. Two identical boxes is IMHO the only way to be sure. > And that count of "3 upgrades/year" is per machine; I doubt that I'm all > that unusual in having some dozen or so servers and about 30 desktops to > cope with, as well as a few other tasks to occupy my time. (In > practice, I'm upgrading *far* less often than 3/year for any machine > that I rely on. Not, of course, that I'm happy with the upgrade > schedule I've been accomplishing; I'm working in "triage" mode.) This kind of conservative approach is most appropriate to critical servers. For workstations I just tend ------------------------------------------------------- Tell a computer to WIN and ... ... You lose ------------------------------------------------------- To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-stable" in the body of the message