Re: Things to watch out for during 9.0->9.1 upgrade?

From: David Wright (david_c_wright_at_hotmail.com)
Date: 08/20/04 

Date: Fri, 20 Aug 2004 09:59:20 +0200

hdysvz@wexrsi.com wrote:

> |Hmm, that's not encouraging. It sounds like Suse does not really have
> |an upgrade mechanism then (reinstalling is not an upgrade). Might be
> |time to check out Debian and Gentoo again... Debian, for all its
> |other faults, certainly doesn't have that problem.
>
> It does actually and works almost always but purists in this NG prefer
> to start from fresh. This is a luxury home users can afford. However in
> some situations, e.g. commercial sites, it's unavoidable to do an
> upgrade because you don't have the luxury of several hours of downtime
> to restore (yes, you should back things up anyway, but the media may be
> slow and only for emergencies).
> --

If you are in a commercial environment, then it is not a luxury to wipe and
re-install, and it is downright dangerous to just do the upgrade. It
normally takes a lot of work and parallel running the new software on a
second machine until it is proved that it works.

OS and major application upgrades should never be applied directly to a
production machine, while it still in a production environment. That is
usually the equivalent of playing commercial Russian Roulette!

Any upgrade such as that should be done on a second box and everything run
in parallel before switching over to live. This means a clean install is
fine, because it will be going onto a different box and once the parallel
test is complete, the backup/test machine can be used as live while the old
live is rebuilt with the new configuration. If the backup/test machine
isn't as powerful as the main machine, you then swap back, otherwise if
they are the same spec or the second machine is more powerful than the old
one, it becomes the new main server and the old server becomes a
backup/test machine...

In some environments I worked in, the backup machines were rented in
specifically for that task, but there again, even big companies can't
always find the odd spare $500,000+ for a test machine ;-)

Dave

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