[olug] Anyone defragging their linux servers?

[Phil Brutsche]

Ryan Stille wrote:
> I don't do updates very often either, I'm afraid of breaking something.  
> How do you guys handle this?    I could run 'yum update' on the dev 
> server, and just let everything update, and then see if the basics are 
> still working ok.  But it may be easy to miss something.  Usually I just 
> update apache/php/mysql and leave the rest alone.  Do you trust it 
> enough to just do a full yum update every night from cron?

With CentOS it helps a lot that we are able to piggyback on Red Hat's QA
procedures, so updates usually have a very very small impact. I recall
only one situation where an update has broken something. It's not like
we're running Fedora or somethin' where stuff breaks regularly :p

Sometimes loading the updates on a dev machine and making sure
everything works afterwards is all you can do - depending on the
environment it may not be a good use of time and resources to thoroughly
test updates, and some updates *just* *can't* *wait*.

With bigger updates (ie a new point release) the CentOS folks are 2+
weeks behind Red Hat, so by the time a new CentOS point release is out
it has had the benefit of RH QA *and* RH customers running RHEL shaking
out the bugs :)

-- 

Phil Brutsche
phil at brutsche.us