Date: Wed, 8 Dec 1999 08:01:14 -0800 (PST) From: David Wolfskill <dhw@whistle.com> To: freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: RE: is -STABLE really stable? Message-ID: <199912081601.IAA52774@pau-amma.whistle.com> In-Reply-To: <NDBBKDINCKINCMKCHGCIGECMCEAA.manek@quadrunner.com>
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
>From: "Sameer R. Manek" <manek@quadrunner.com> >Date: Tue, 7 Dec 1999 21:05:38 -0800 >> As I recall, Steve O'Hara-Smith wrote: >> > This is an interesting topic in it's own right. There is a fairly >> > large body of opinion that the right way to treat a production system >> > is never to upgrade it at all, rather to periodically replace it with >> > a well tested replacement using later software. >> The best way, if you can afford the time and hardware. >All it really needs is 1 spare box. Assuming upgrades are performed every release, that's only 3 upgrades a year. And the cost of the extra hardware will be about $100/month for a lease. Most business can afford the hardware, it's the labor that's expensive. Even then having a spare system is justifable. Unless I'm confused rather more than is usual -- which is by no means especially unlikely -- that also assumes that the "spare box" hardware is sufficiently close to that of the "production systems" that the resulting system can be tested with sufficient confidence (for some value of "sufficient") that the results will apply to the production system -- or, better yet, that the "spare box" can actually *become* the (new) "production system". (Then the just-retired system becomes the "spare box"... after sufficient burn-in....) Of course, this also presumes that the sysadmin(s) can tell when one set of hardware is "sufficiently close" to some other (sometimes arbitrary) set of hardware, which is certainly not the case with my dealings with PC hardware. :-( Others may well have different perspectives, certainly. And that count of "3 upgrades/year" is per machine; I doubt that I'm all that unusual in having some dozen or so servers and about 30 desktops to cope with, as well as a few other tasks to occupy my time. (In practice, I'm upgrading *far* less often than 3/year for any machine that I rely on. Not, of course, that I'm happy with the upgrade schedule I've been accomplishing; I'm working in "triage" mode.) Cheers, david -- David Wolfskill dhw@whistle.com UNIX System Administrator voice: (650) 577-7158 pager: (888) 347-0197 FAX: (650) 372-5915 To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-stable" in the body of the message
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?199912081601.IAA52774>