Stephan A. Rickauer wrote:
The question is how you OpenBSD guys handle the upgrade issue. From the website I learned that -STABLE is maintained for only one year (= two releases). Given that upgrading by skipping one release is not recommended, does that mean one needs to upgrade the entire OS every half year? I couldn't get that from the website.
From my experience, I can say that upgrading is not actually an "issue" with OpenBSD. This can be best explained with one of the catch-phrases that describe it, "OpenBSD constantly evolves, it does not revolutionize all the time." Version numbers are mostly that, numbers, and an indication that several weeks of disciplined quality assurance went into it after another development cycle.
The result is really painless upgrades -- maybe not in a sense of (attempted) automation like on some other OSes, but in terms of breakages. The time saved by the fact that everything typically Just Works makes up for the few additional manual steps during upgrades, and Nick Holland is so kind to supply very thorough upgradeXY.html documents for every release, outlining any possible "gotcha"s.
There are also several ways to speed up upgrades when dealing with lots of similar boxes, slightly customized `release(8)'s via siteXY.tgz and so on.
All in all, it helps to have some support infrastructure to manage an OpenBSD deployment -- e.g. a build box and maybe one or two representative test boxes (although that's good to have with any other OS as well.)
As I am writing this, your second mail just came in. With your HA setup, there won't even be any downtime during upgrades, and they will *really* be painless as you probably don't have to deal with any package upgrades. Reboot new kernel, untar sets, apply a prepared patch for /etc, MAKEDEV and mtree, reboot and you're good to go after some 5 minutes, give or take, per box.
Of course, simply swapping out harddrives with an upgraded installation is another possibility.
Moritz
