Les Mikesell wrote:
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
I'm not a fan of continuously applying zillions of updates. How in the
world are you supposed to test this stuff?
There's a big difference between a distribution like fedora where
updates are to get new features as fast as possible and one like RHEL
(and thus Centos) where the updates are only to fix things known to be
broken if you don't apply the fix. By the time those updates arrive
they have been tested more than you or I would ever be able to do,
although it is always a good idea to test a single machine first and
keep an old kernel in your grub config so you can select it at bootup if
the new one has a problem.
> And for me, crossing my
fingers and applying everything Red Hat throws at me is merely passing
the buck. When things break, my clients don't want to hear that it was
Red Hat's fault...
Is it any different when windows breaks? Do they want to hear its
Microsoft's fault?
I can tell you some stories...everyone uses windows xp service pack 2
right? When i applied that on one machine it screwed it up entirely to
the point of a re-install. And everyone's installed that 100's of times
before. Why did it blow up - who knows. Do i take the blame - hell no,
its Microsoft's fault! Did it stop me from applying SP2 on other pc's -
no. If it did plenty of systems would be fairly insecure ;)
I've had other times where certain windows updates have blown things up
like IE7 and java based popups, security updates etc...Microsoft usually
issue a patch or replacement update or workaround relatively quickly.
And again just yesterday a Nod32 update in the XMON package crippled the
exchange message store on the windows server version. An update was
released within hours.
You cant test everything, and you cant take the blame for everything.
Clients have made the decision to purchase/use these products. Nothing
works 100%. At the end of the day clients want to know that a problem
gets fixed and that it can be avoided in the future.
The beauty of open source products is that if something breaks it is
usually fixed by the community almost immediately. Something you dont
quite get with some other proprietary packages which may take days to
fix. But then Les (Mikesell) is quite right. You pay a vendor for their
support and the service to fix anything broken. i.e. RHEL4 and redhat
network. I haven't seen a redhat broken package for some time.
Infact in 5+ years i can only remember one broken thing with Redhat -
samba (about 3 years ago). At that time we had to compile samba packages
from samba.org to resolve. That problem ended up actually being a
windows interraction problem, not necessarily samba's fault.
Don't get me wrong though, I'm not "gung-ho", I too am conservative, and
you have to be in production environments. But i don't think you can be
ultra conservative. Clients want secure feature rich servers.
Regards,
Les Stott
If you have RHEL, you have paid for the service for them to fix known
problems. There's a reason they call the fixes 'errata'. It is a lot
of work for them to produce the updates and I don't think they would do
it if they did not consider them necessary.
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