[geeks] Policy for system / package upgrades in Enterprise

[gsm at mendelson.com]

On Mon, Jul 26, 2010 at 06:49:52PM +0530, Katrina Gawas wrote:

>We are trying to set policies for system / packages upgrade in our
>company. Currently most of our systems have Ubuntu 8.04LTS server.
>What do you think should be the policies in regards to the following:

You have my sympathty. UBUNTU is a pain in the backside if you plan to do
anything beyond the padded cell they want you to use. And it is very 
fragile, I have a 9.10 system, upgraded from a 9.04 system, where GNOME
refuses to work. 

I can start X use it with FVWM, TWM, KDE, etc and it works fine. But GDM and
any GNOME application crashes with no useful information. Reinstalling 
everything did not fix it, but I am not going to do a clean install, I
use the system every day. 

Eventially I'll upgrade it to 10.04, it should be relatively clean by now.

There are all sorts of bugs they simply ignore, even if they first appeared
version 6. 

Long term support is a very nebulous term, they only provide fixes for 
problems they consider worth fixing. I was running 8.04 on a server and I
needed a security fix they did not deem important enough, so that became an
upgrade to 9.04. 

It was a mistake 9.04 dropped support for IDE optical drives and I had to
try to make an 8.10 kernel run it for several months. 

BTW 9.04 also never worked on an Intel Atom or similar processor, they
came out with an overblown feature rich (as in bloated) version that
did, but it would not boot on my desktop.

I still have not gotten my POP server to work properly, due to a bug in
password autentication I have to restart it every two hours or it fails
to authenitcate. 

If it wasn't for the fact I have lots customization to the system, I would
just wipe it and install CENTOS, or if I had any money to spend, RHEL.

I'm not a noob, I've been working with UNIX since 1990, and Linux since 1995.

>
>* Upgrading of packages? Say as per some requirement developers needs
>java6u20 on production machines and currently Ubuntu 8.04 LTS only
>supports java6u6. There is one view from our IT head that one should
>upgrade the OS to keep up with the package requirement. Is this
>correct/viable?

No, one should have an OS that does not need an upgrade every couple of months
just to exist. 


>* Upgrading of OS? Ubuntu 8.04 LTS support will be available for a few
>more years. What should be the proposed OS change cycle. Or should
>only parts of the OS stack be updated as per requirement?

I would dump UBUNTU. If Oracle had not changed their support policies, I would
have said to go to Solaris for Java development, but unless your company is
rich, I expect you are stuck with Linux. I just would get rid of UBUNTU as
quickly as possible.

Geoff.

-- 
Geoffrey S. Mendelson N3OWJ/4X1GM
To help restaurants, as part of the "stimulus package", everyone must order 
dessert. As part of the socialized health plan, you are forbidden to eat it. :-)