On Wed, Jan 13, 2010 at 09:45:06AM -0600, Bryce T. Pier spake thusly: > So I'm curious what other people are doing on the Linux platform.
Wherever possible we run redundant system/clusters. Patch one of them. See that all goes well (or not) then patch the rest (or not). But really I haven't had a problem with RHEL/CentOS machines not coming back from a reboot. Our own occasional lack of reboot testing after network config changes is the most likely culprit in this case. Worst that has ever happened as far as system upgrades/patches is perl/python libraries get upgraded and become incompatible such that we have to patch our apps or something. > Do you use root disk mirrors and break the mirror prior to patching? No although that isn't a bad idea. Just make sure you know how (which means having standardized, documented, and tested the procedure plenty) to boot from the root mirror if necessary. Anything which isn't exercised on a regular basis is going to fail. We have occasionally done mostly unnecessary machine rebuilds/reinstalls just for "fun" and practice to prove that we can. > Do you utilize filesystem dumps (dumpe2fs, etc) or rely on enterprise > backups of the OS filesystems? bacula backups but having to restore would be a real pain and incur significant downtime. > Do you use rpm rollbacks? Nope. > Rebuild / re-image the server if there are problems? Yes. In an enterprise serious about running machines version controller kickstart, repository, and puppet configs are the way to go. Pretty much any machine should be rebuildable. You never want to let rebuilding get so difficult that you couldn't do it fast enough in case of a failure nor would you want to be tempted to skip the rebuild in case of intrusion. > Additionally, have you experienced many instances of patching tanking an > enterprise Linux server in the last couple of years? Nope. -- Tracy Reed http://tracyreed.org
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