On Tue, Feb 9, 2010 at 11:35 AM, Chris Adams <[email protected]> wrote: > Once upon a time, Tom Sightler <[email protected]> said: >> On Mon, 2010-02-08 at 22:47 -0600, Chris Adams wrote: >> > Tru64 also supported in-place version upgrades, unlike RHEL, so if you >> > were running 5.0A and really needed something in 5.1B, you didn't have >> > to format the drive or build a new system (rolling updates in a cluster >> > means users never even see an outage). >> >> I don't understand this part. You can certainly do 5.0 -> 5.1 style >> upgrades "in-place", and you can upgrade between major versions using >> boot media (either net boot, CD, whatever) if you wish, no requirement >> to format the drive. > > According to the Red Hat docs, you can upgrade that way, but it is not a > supported upgrade path. To me, that means they don't test it (or at > least not much), so I can't expect it to work on a production system. > If it breaks part of the way through, or installs a bogus package set, > etc., I'm stuck with a busted system and no path back to a working > system but to wipe and restore from backups. >
Hmm did Digital/Compaq/HP-UX always have that sort of we will support you upgrading from X.0 to X.1. I remember a very long contract call with just that situation and being told that unless we had an onsite engineer it wasn't supported and even then they recommended a rebuild/install. I thought it was HP and Tru64 which was the cause of that week of misery. If they changed then there is hope that RH will do so in the future. I have no idea about current upgrade testing, but I know that it is a pain in the butt to support. I did it for RHL for a long time and it was a breeze if you didn't let a customer touch the system :). I could upgrade RHL-3.0.3 to RHL-7.2 and the system would work. However customers would add stuff, move things like /etc to /usr/local/etc because they ran out of room one time etc and then expect it to work. Doing it for CentOS systems, I could do updates from 2.1 to 5 without issues as long as I was generous in the beginning for setting up the system. Make space tight where in the middle of an RPM upgrade you needed more space than the final space would be and poof you were toast but you couldn't tell how much space you might need because it was depended on things like number of rows in a database or how well something uncompressed. In such cases, you want to say that in general we aren't going to support you.. but if you have enough money/time we can work it out. For a lot of places, in that case you look at the bill and say "well hell, its cheaper for me to reinstall." but for some its not. -- Stephen J Smoogen. Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp. Or what's a heaven for? -- Robert Browning _______________________________________________ rhelv5-list mailing list [email protected] https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/rhelv5-list
