Date: Sun, 16 Jul 2000 22:58:58 -0400 From: Garance A Drosihn <drosih@rpi.edu> To: <winter@villaweb.net> Cc: <freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: RE: Upgrading 3.5-STABLE to 4.0-STABLE Message-ID: <v04210103b59821d0aae6@[128.113.24.47]> In-Reply-To: <NAEEIIDBPDGAIKAKOKKDMEGGCLAA.winter@villaweb.net> References: <NAEEIIDBPDGAIKAKOKKDMEGGCLAA.winter@villaweb.net>
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At 9:40 PM -0400 7/16/00, Phil Rosenthal wrote:
>Is it possible to ignore the "reboot in single mode" part?
>
>It is not possible to get this system into single mode, because
>it has to be up, always.
>it can have a maximum downtime of maybe 45 seconds, which is
>too long to go into single mode and compile stuff.
>I know it is obviously more dangerous to be in multi-user mode,
>but is it one of those "better safe than sorry, but it will
>probably work" things?
If you have a machine which really has that kind of uptime
requirement, then you need to rethink your upgrade strategy.
There's no absolute guarantee that everything is going to
work after upgrading (particularly when doing a large jump,
such as going from 3.5 to 4.0-stable). Even if everything
DOES work, it might be that it'll take an extra 30 seconds
to boot up. I can not imagine feeling comfortable saying
"sure, go ahead, it will 'probably' work"
if you really can not afford a minute's worth of downtime. If
the upgrade does work 99% of the time, and you happen to hit
that other 1%, then you're screwed. I would not want to be
responsible for you finding yourself screwed.
I realize you probably also have the constraint that you
can not spend any money on redundant equipment, but at some
point reality will have to set in. Either get redundant
equipment, or give up on 45-second maximum downtime, or
simply do not do upgrades.
That's just my view of things, of course... In my case, I
have a machine where the goal for maximum downtime is more
like 30 MINUTES, and yet I have a duplicate machine for that
case. I'm certainly not going to recommend that you jump
into 4.0-stable on a critical production machine without
doing some testing of it before switching to it.
[aside: on that machine, I'm about 3 hours away from having
one year's worth of continuous uptime... :-) ]
---
Garance Alistair Drosehn = gad@eclipse.acs.rpi.edu
Senior Systems Programmer or drosih@rpi.edu
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
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