On Sunday 26 March 2006 09:52 pm, William L. Maltby wrote:
Yes, exactly. First, use the mailing list archives and search for postings related/time-of 4.2 update and see what problems folks had and how they solved them. I did that *at-the-time* and had no problems (maybe just lucky, but I did integrate all that information into my process). No one here will be able (or want to) regurgitate all the good information contained in the archives. Like school, homework helps the learning process.
A personal suggestion: break the updates into small chunks, based on date, and install all or part of them, wait a few days to see if things are stable. If so, apply the next chunk. The reason for this is problem isolation and reduction of risk caused by "massiveness". Recent complaints include folks having yum fail to complete properly and they are left with substantial effort to back out and re-do.
Third suggestion:, as Craig states, the reason for using an enterprise- class is timeliness, among other things. Keep current. Use good procedures to either enable quick back-out/recovery (2nd choice, but needed regardless) or do at least minimal (but exhaustive (semi?) is preferable) testing before installation. Actually both are desirable. As Craig stated, risk from security vulnerabilities *probably* is higher than risk from updates *if* you are doing things "The Right Wayz" (TM).
Using a test bed machine is what I used to do. Usually I do that on my notebook, whereas it resembles my current production server. However, since I migrate all my servers from FC4 to Centos4.2, I still haven't got any test machine yet, the notebook is still on FC4.
I guess, I'll make a dual boot on the notebook between FC5 and Centos4.2 soon. Thanks, I'll research into the list archive. Luckily I've never deleted any list emails that I subscribe. :)