Bennett Haselton wrote: > On Thu, Dec 29, 2011 at 10:49 AM, Les Mikesell > <lesmikesell at gmail.com>wrote: > >> > Would it not be best for the vast majority of those users to have >> updates turned on by default? If not, why not? (Power users can >> always turn them off, after all.) >> >> If your service is important, then it is worth testing changes before >> making them on your important server. But no one else can tell you >> whether your server is that important or not... It's fairly trivial >> to run a 'yum update' on a lab server daily, and if anything updates, >> make sure that things still work before repeating it on the production >> box(es). The update checks can be scripted, but the "does it still >> work" test will be unique to your services. > > But these are all considerations mainly for power users; I'm still talking > just about the vast majority of hosting company customers who just lease a > dedicated or virtual private server, and don't even have a "test server" > and a "production server". Why wouldn't it be best for those servers just <snip> A. If you are a business, and don't have a test/development server, you're an idiot, and will be out of business shortly, broke, after too many errors in production. And before you say anything, in addition to huge companies, I've worked for companies as small as 12 and even 6, and *everyone* had a test/development servers. B. Hosting providers, if you're not buying colo, do the testing and rollout of updates themselves, not trusting to the "vast majority of hosting company customers" to update with bug and security fixes. mark