Date: Mon, 22 Jul 2002 09:48:44 -0600 From: David Wilk <admin@cia-g.com> To: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: FreeBSD upgrade maintenance vs. debian (please help) Message-ID: <20020722094844.D9023@cygnus.wks.Gallup.cia-g.com>
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Howdy folks, I'm looking to setup a new server for an ISP (I'm the admin) and am really attracted to the performance and stability of FreeBSD. THere are many other attractions as well, but there's one thing I'm wrestling with. The recent security probs (libc, libdns, ssh) have given me quick lessons on FreeBSD updates on a pre-production box. I'm not terribly thrilled with the amount of downtime necessary to keep a FreeBSD box up to date. I'm talking about the 'shutdown to single user mode, make installworld, reboot to new GENERIC, test, reboot to CUSTOM and yer back in production'. I'm also concerned with what will happen in about a year when security updates are nolonger available for 4.6.1. An upgrade to the latest 4.x or 5.x will undoubtedly be a big deal with substantial downtime. How do you guys deal with this? warm-failover systems to take over during downtimes? Or do you just accept that the system will go down for a while at least once/year? I come from a debian background where during the 1.5-2 year development cycle and then 6 mos after, security updates to the system are as simple as apt-get update&&apt-get upgrade with zero downtime. once the 2-2.5 year cycle passes and it's time for a full upgrade, this can be done while the system is in production, again, with no downtime (services are automatically restarted usually within seconds). Now, kernel upgrades are a whole different story, and quite necessary with the 2.4.x series. However, that's a single reboot with little risk of having to boot back into the old one if something goes wrong. I'm currently lusting after the superior performance (in so many respects) of the FreeBSD kernel (and I prefer the BSD style init) but am apprehensive about the update/upgrade process. so, FreeBSD advocates and experienced sysadmins, convince me to go FreeBSD, Please! thanks, Dave -- ******************************* David Wilk System Administrator Community Internet Access, Inc. admin@cia-g.com To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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