Date: Mon, 22 May 2006 15:41:55 +1000 From: David Nugent <davidn@datalinktech.com.au> To: Doug Hardie <bc979@lafn.org>, freebsd-stable@freebsd.org Subject: Re: FreeBSD Security Survey Message-ID: <44714F23.6000504@datalinktech.com.au> In-Reply-To: <66DF01E1-277C-42EE-896E-1E7F4C2ABDDE@lafn.org> References: <4471361B.5060208@freebsd.org> <66DF01E1-277C-42EE-896E-1E7F4C2ABDDE@lafn.org>
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Doug Hardie wrote: > On May 21, 2006, at 20:55, Colin Percival wrote: >> If you administrate system(s) running FreeBSD (in the broad sense of >> "are >> responsible for keeping system(s) secure and up to date"), please visit >> http://people.freebsd.org/~cperciva/survey.html >> and complete the survey below before May 31st, 2006. > > What doesn't fit into the survey very well is that all my servers are > production ones and it causes a lot of grief for users when I bring > them down. I try to hold updates to once per year because of that. I > am currently in the middle of upgrading from 5.3 to 6.0. The easy > machines are done but there are still a few that will take > considerable on-site time which is not easy to come by. A good failover strategy comes into play here. If you have one, then taking a single production machine off-line for a short period should be no big deal, even routine, and should not even be noticed by users if done correctly. This should be planned for and part of the network/system design. Yes, it definitely requires more resources to support, but I'll rephrase the same problem: what happens when (and I mean *when* and not *if*) a motherboard or network card fries or you suffer a hard disk crash (even 2+ drives failing at the same time on a raid array is not particularly unusual considering that drives are quite often from the same manufactured batch)? Lack of a failover on mission critical systems that *can't* be offline is like playing russian roulette.
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