Okay, let's compare upgrading OpenBSD 4.9 + Nginx + PHP 5.2.x to OpenBSD 5.0 + Nginx + PHP 5.3.x vice upgrading Windows 2003 + IIS 6 + ASPDotNet 3.5 to Windows 2008 + IIS 7.0 + ASPDotNet 4.0.
In my experience, the MicroEvil Upgrade works without breaking any of my web apps. The OpenBSD upgrade gets confused about Nginx versions and PHP versions. Maybe it gets less confused if I happen to know about some system variable that describes the version of PHP that I want. Granted: I do hold an MCSE certification, but I don't need it. The upgrade just works. Well... despite occasional BSOD's ;) I really *really* want to go the BSD path, but it seems so much more difficult. Respectfully Submitted, R. Toby Richards Network Administrator Superior Court of California In and for the County of San Luis Obispo (805) 781-4150 ________________________________________ From: Kenneth R Westerback [kwesterb...@rogers.com] Sent: Monday, May 21, 2012 8:01 PM To: Richards, Toby Cc: misc@openbsd.org Subject: Re: Upgrading OpenBSD On Mon, May 21, 2012 at 06:43:19PM -0700, Richards, Toby wrote: > While my question involves other BSD's as well as Linux systems, I am > asking this here because OpenBSD's philosophy is the most attractive > to me. > > I've got about 50 servers to manage. OpenBSD does have an Upgrade > option, but does it upgrade the installed packages? As far as I can > tell, it does not. I do very much appreciate the technology that has > come from the OpenBSD project, yet it seems to me that most *free* > operating systems do not fully support an upgrade path. I can't [fully] > upgrade from one OpenBSD release to another (unless following STABLE > gets me from one RELEASE to another, but AFAIK it does not). I cannot > seamlessly upgrade from Free/PC-BSD 8.x to 9.x. Instead I must > re-install from scrach. The same goes for CentOS/RHEL 5.x to 6.x, and > for every version of Mint Linux. Not really sure what you mean by 'fully' upgrade. Doing the normal upgrade and then 'pkg_add -ui' does it all for me. It does not magically upgrade database structures, etc. of course, but what does? > > The two major commercial operating systems (considered to be evil by > the FOSS community) easily upgrade from one version to the next. That's > important in a real-life production environment. In 2001, I upgraded > 200 workstations and 7 servers from Windows NT 4.0 to Windows 2000 > without incident. I've had similar experience with all subsiquent > MicroEvil systems. I do hate MicroEvil, but I can make only limited > conclusions regarding the upgrade paths of other operating systems: > > 1) Your project exists only for the sake of doing the project, and for > the technologies that it produces (such as OpenSSH). True, but not relevant to your case I think. > > 2) Folks are expected to install a version of OpenBSD, but not upgrade > because there's no reason to fix something that isn't broken. Something is *always* broken. OpenBSD *strongly* recommends upgrading every six months with every release. We give strong impetus for this by not supporting more than 1 release back. We *expect* everyone to be keeping up. > > 3) OpenBSD is only for organizations who have so few servers or so many > IT folks that re-installing everything from scratch is not inviably > cumbersome. Untrue. Many organizations have large number of OpenBSD boxes. A full manual 'official method' upgrade (including a few hundred packages!) usually takes me less than twenty minutes, including backing up the old and new configuration (a.k.a. /etc, /var) information. Certain *vastly* less time than it ever takes me or those I watch (giggling) to upgrade any version of Windows and the packages thereon. And that's including full bore enterprise situations with outsourcing 'experts', SCM (or whatever MS calls it these days), multi-gigabit network everywhere, etc. There are various automated install tools out there too, but not (yet) officially part of the release. > > 4) I am oblivious to some upgrade path technique for FOSS operating > systems. Merely lacking experience I'd say. .... Ken > > Please enlighten me. > > Respectfully Submitted, > R. Toby Richards > Network Administrator > Superior Court of California > In and for the County of San Luis Obispo > (805) 781-4150
