[Gllug] Ubuntu and me - suggestions requested (polite ones

[Ryan Cartwright]

2008/11/14 John Edwards <john at cornerstonelinux.co.uk>:
> I've met too many servers that are running old versions of Debian
> that have not been upgraded, either because the downtime can not
> be arranged or someone has relied on a particular software version.

That's not something limited to Debian and part of that situation is
often caused by the growing gap between the installed and latest
versions. As time continues, the time required to upgrade such systems
grows as well and eventually it becomes too scary a prospect. It comes
down to system management and keeping on top of package upgrades -
neither of which the sysadmin has time for in those kinds of cases. In
short, that's a management not a distro issue.

IME Debian actually helps avoid those situations - given time to
manage package upgrades. I manage several servers in various offices.
They provide required services so downtime must be kept to a minimum.
Two are running an ageing SuSE which is no longer supported. I cannot
upgrade (to a newer version) them without taking them down for a
period so I am forced to keep them going by compiling from source as
opposed to packages. In fact there is no real direct upgrade path to
the newest versions because of changes that have taken place. On the
other hand the other 14 servers are running Debian Etch/4/stable and
when the time comes to upgrade them to Lenny, the downtime will be
minimal ( I hope :) ). One of them actually started with Sarge and
required a dist-upgrade, this was applied with virtually no interrupt
to the services and even though it required a reboot the server was
down for a total of about three minutes. In the situation that server
is in this is acceptable. The two SuSE servers are now scheduled for
upgrade to Debian.

> I know that this can all be fixed from a technical point of view,
> but given the choice many businesses would like to know how long
> the software they use is going to be supported.

This is true but it will depend upon the type of business. Quite a few
businesses see the job of package support wrapped up with server
support and will rely on a vendor or third party support company for
that. In that sense the client won't care whether the distro offers
LTS only if the vendor will. The vendor of other hand will care about
the distro or will have a series of test machines to test full
upgrades on first.

cheers
-- 
Ryan Cartwright
Equitas IT Solutions
http://www.equitasit.co.uk
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