Upgrades driving me crazy....

[John Aldrich]

Quoting Michael Pawlowsky <mikep at clearskymedia.ca>:

>
> Are there any other people using FC in a production enterprise environment?
>
> The constant upgrades are driving me nuts. We have machines at
> FC8-FC9-FC10 and FC-11.
>
> 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.
>
> But now since FC8 is no longer being supported, it has caused some real
> issues. One main one is that yum is not updated and even rpm packages
> that we create ourselves will no longer install on it.
>
> We've been through this before since we've been using FC ever since in
> broke out of RH.
>
> 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.
>
> I'm thinking of trying ESXi to make installing quicker. Reconfigure an
> new image locally, clone it and push it to the virtual server.
>
> 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.
>
> To make things more difficult, our servers need to be up 24/7.
>
> Is FC simply a bad choice for enterprise production.
>
> 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.
>
> So I was just wondering what other people in this situation do?
>
>
Best bet is to upgrade everything to the latest release of Fedora and  
then let it automatically upgrade you when the new release is out.  
There has been a thread here recently on that very feature. :-) As  
part of the automatic updates, it will detect a new release and  
reconfigure YUM, etc to change to the new version repo and download  
and install the updates required to get the new version installed.

Now, you'll have to start with F11, most likely, but once you get all  
your production machines to F11, it *should not* be a problem. Then  
again, I managed to kill my home system just by normal updates...  
*sigh* Gotta love free operating systems... :-)