[clue-tech] WS upgrades [was My/PgSQLs and FVWM on RH]

[David L. Anselmi]

Collins Richey wrote:
[...]
> However, the sticking point is this. There is no good way in any Linux
> distro (or Windows for that matter) to upgrade 100+ workstations from
> a lower level to a much newer level. Sigh.

Yeah.  If you let a machine get too out of date it's scrap and rebuild.

For proprietary OSs machines are always "too out of date" when a new 
version comes out.  Vendors work hard to make a good upgrade procedure 
but too much changes even then.

For Open Source, I'd think you'd want a distro to do many small updates 
rather than big ones every 6 months, year, whatever.  People tend to 
avoid that on servers (proprietary or custom apps that are a pain to 
rebuild against a new OS).  But it's pay me now or pay me later and 
there never seems to be time to do it right later.

My last job there was a server (run by a developer more than an admin) 
running Solaris 6.  To upgrade it meant upgrading Informix, which meant 
upgrading our app, which meant it was too hard.  But we couldn't leave 
it because Sun was no longer patching sendmail on Solaris 6 so the box 
had security holes in it.  Sigh.

Maybe someday I'll run custom and proprietary apps on Debian testing 
(upgraded weekly/monthly), make it work no matter what, and write a 
paper about whether that's a better way to go and what the apps have to 
do to play nice.  (If there are any proprietary apps you can buy to run 
on Debian.)

It shouldn't be impossible--Debian does it for all their apps.  Good 
argument to avoid proprietary software.

Sorry, I'm rambling.

Dave
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