From owner-freebsd-questions Sat Aug 31 8:47:13 2002 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.FreeBSD.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 714EC37B400 for ; Sat, 31 Aug 2002 08:47:09 -0700 (PDT) Received: from sage-one.net (adsl-65-71-135-137.dsl.crchtx.swbell.net [65.71.135.137]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 54E1443E6E for ; Sat, 31 Aug 2002 08:47:08 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from jackstone@sage-one.net) Received: from sagea (sagea [192.168.0.3]) by sage-one.net (8.11.6/8.11.6) with SMTP id g7VFkwS40039; Sat, 31 Aug 2002 10:46:59 -0500 (CDT) (envelope-from jackstone@sage-one.net) Message-Id: <3.0.5.32.20020831104657.014b5a00@mail.sage-one.net> X-Sender: jackstone@mail.sage-one.net X-Mailer: QUALCOMM Windows Eudora Pro Version 3.0.5 (32) Date: Sat, 31 Aug 2002 10:46:57 -0500 To: tonerboy , Erik Trulsson From: "Jack L. Stone" Subject: Re: Updating world with least downtime Cc: Brooks Davis , "David W. Chapman Jr." , freebsd-questions@freebsd.org In-Reply-To: <20020831101844.R88090-100000@iguana.reptiles.org> References: <20020830205320.GA66525@falcon.midgard.homeip.net> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG At 11:05 AM 8.31.2002 -0400, tonerboy wrote: >On Fri, 30 Aug 2002, Erik Trulsson wrote: > >> On Fri, Aug 30, 2002 at 03:40:31PM -0500, Jack L. Stone wrote: >> > At 01:26 PM 8.30.2002 -0700, Brooks Davis wrote: >> > >On Fri, Aug 30, 2002 at 03:07:14PM -0500, Jack L. Stone wrote: >> > >> Yes, that's what I do after taking an image of the drive and also using the >> > >> "build box" as the first test to see if everything works okay. Downtime is >> > >> only a matter of seconds... riskier, yes, but acceptable with the image to >> > >> fall back on. Dropping to the single-user mode causes a downtime of about >> > >> 30 minutes otherwise on a 1.4G CPU machine... longer on slower machines. >> > >> Everthing is now done via scripts. >> > > >> > >If it's taking that long, it's got some serious problems even with the >> > >rediculous post times many boards have today. My laptop (with 3400RPM >> > >disk) takes <15. >> > > >> > >-- Brooks >> > > >> > >> > I don't believe your laptop does installworld, mergemaster, etc all in 15 >> > minutes.... we must must be talking different things.... >> >> Why not? My computer does a installworld+mergemaster in approx. 30 >> minutes and it is an old 166 MHz Pentium with only 32 MB RAM (and with >> a IDE controller that hasn't even heard of UDMA.) >> >> I would expect it to be significantly faster on a modern machine and 15 >> min sounds quite plausible for a modern laptop with a somewhat slow disk. >> > My pII-233 took about 20 doing 4.6psomething (from april) to 4.6 >Tuesday. Using mergemaster within the same major revision cuts down the >grope and edit dramatically. Probably would have taken less if I hadn't >walked away during the installworld. > > Which begs the question, what does this box do that it is uptime >critical? I thought I heard firewall but may be mistaken. The beauty of >FreeBSD is that it runs on commodity (read cheap) hardware. The highest >zoot boxes of today can handle a wackload of connections before coming >close to the wall. Why not take a look at load and consider replacing it >with a couple of less than cutting edge boxes and rotate them in and out >of service so you have a backup box you can rebuild at your leisure? > > And ummm .. Erik. I can build a kernel in under 20 minutes. The >joy of 40 minute builds wore off quick (remember 2 hour builds with >486s?). Buildworld in ~3 hrs. > > Cheers! > When I replied to the orignal poster, whose main concern was about minimizing downtime, my main focus was on explaining my own method used which causes a downtime of only one reboot -- a few seconds on a production box with 1GHz CPU and 7200rpm HDs. I didn't realize this would become a "race" upsmanship discussion. In looking back at the records (rather than off the top of head), my actual downtime a few months ago when dropping to single-user mode for installworld-mergemaster was about 20 mins and this was running mergemaster -v and going through each change on a full-service server machine. Back to the original poster who hasn't replied further, there is a choice of being down a few seconds or a few minutes depending on the machine's speeds and approach. Now about the fastest beer guzzler....?? Best regards, Jack L. Stone, Administrator SageOne Net http://www.sage-one.net jackstone@sage-one.net To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message