[geeks] Policy for system / package upgrades in Enterprise

[Katrina Gawas]

Thanks for the reply. We are open to suggestions regarding change of
OS. U have already mentioned CENTOS & RHEL; What would you recommend
keeping our requirement of adhering to ISO 27k requirements?


On Mon, Jul 26, 2010 at 7:53 PM,  <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.
> 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.
> :-)
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