Upgrades driving me crazy....

[Simon Andrews]

Michael Pawlowsky wrote:
> 
> Are there any other people using FC in a production enterprise environment?

Production, certainly.  We have 7 fedora servers all providing public 
facing services over a range of different functionalities.  All are 
running F11.

> The constant upgrades are driving me nuts. We have machines at 
> FC8-FC9-FC10 and FC-11.

It's a bit of a pain, but we keep all of our machines on the latest 
release (usually update a couple of weeks after the release).  We treat 
each upgrade as an opportunity to do scheduled maintainance on that 
machine and twice a year seems to work out pretty well.


> The main reason we are using FC is because one it's free (in a sense).
> The next one is that it does include more recent versions of packages 
> that we use and are looking for the latest versions to take advantage of 
> some new features and so on.

Likewise.


> So basically we are in a never ending cycles of upgrades. And since we 
> have had bad experiences trying to upgrade over the last version, our 
> policy is to back up the data, re-install and put back in all the data.

We went the other way.  All of our upgrades are true upgrades over the 
last version.  We've never had a major issue when doing this (but plenty 
of minor ones - all easily fixed).  We've got at least one machine which 
has done every release since FC1, others have been added along the way. 
  Our experience has certainly been that this causes less pain (and is 
quicker) than a wipe and reinstall.


> Also, I am wondering why it is not possible to simply keep upgrading 
> packages, kernel and so on, as opposed to coming up with new versions 
> every six months.

Well you can, sort of.  One of our machines has been yum updated through 
several versions.  It's a pretty minimal install, but it's had no more 
problems than the machines which did the officially supported updates.


> To make things more difficult, our servers need to be up 24/7.

Surely you have scheduled downtime for any server?  We just link our 
scheduled maintainance to the dates for the Fedora updates and kill two 
birds with one stone.


> Is FC simply a bad choice for enterprise production.

It depends on your priorities.  It actually works out really well for us.

> I'm starting to want to try CentOS soon. Unfortunately this will mean 
> not always being able to take advantage of the latest features in 
> software and so on.

Well that's the downside of stability.

Hope this helps

Simon.