[geeks] Policy for system / package upgrades in Enterprise

[Phil Stracchino]

On 07/26/10 10:23, gsm at mendelson.com wrote:
> 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.

9.10 was the Upgrade From Hell that broke to some greater or lesser
extent on something like 70% of upgraded machines...  according to
reports, something like 10% of Ubuntu users who upgraded hit problems
they never did manage to solve.  Canonical's response was pretty much
"Sorry, sucks to be you."

It was also the 9.10 upgrade that killed the display on the laptop my
wife had at the time.  When it came back up after "upgrade", as soon as
it booted it began strobing the screen backlight on and off three or
four times a second, and enabling and disabling all input devices
keyboard at the same rate, which made it almost impossible to type,
making it very slow to try to do anything to fix the problem.  After
about half an hour of trying to fix it, the backlight failed.  I
replaced the backlight CCFL, but apparently made some subtle error while
disassembling or reassembling the LCD panel, and never managed to get
the LCD working again.

9.10 clean installations worked fine.  But the upgrade ... "So what you
have to ask yourself is, 'Do I feel lucky?'  Well ... do ya, punk?"


-- 
  Phil Stracchino, CDK#2     DoD#299792458     ICBM: 43.5607, -71.355
  alaric at caerllewys.net   alaric at metrocast.net   phil at co.ordinate.org
         Renaissance Man, Unix ronin, Perl hacker, Free Stater
                 It's not the years, it's the mileage.