Re: Reducing downtime on system critical services

[Petr Cech <cech@atrey.karlin.mff.cuni.cz>]

On Tue, Apr 04, 2000 at 10:43:53AM +1000 , Craig Sanders wrote:
> On Mon, Apr 03, 2000 at 09:11:30PM +0300, ressu@uusikaupunki.fi wrote:
> > once again, i was upgrading a system, and got MANY angry calls about
> > 'mails not working'. wouldn't it be good to have a list, flag or some
> > other way of marking these system critical packages, so that apt would
> > configure other packages before it, install it and configure it. so
> > that it would have a minimum downtime.
> 
> i've done the same thing on my mail servers in the past. i avoid it now
> by only upgrading postfix and cucipop and other mail-related packages
> manually.

or put in /var/state/apt/status.user somehing like
Package: postfix
Important: yes

Package: cucipop
Important: yes

and these packages will be configured immediately after installing

> how would it be possible to flag these packages, when different packages
> are important to different people? e.g. sendmail is important to you,

see above

> but irrelevant to me because i don't use it. and even on different
> systems, different packages are important - on my mail server, i don't
> want postfix down for ages - but i don't care how long it is down on
> my web server or proxy server....while on my proxy server, squid is
> important, and on my web servers, apache and/or postgres is important.

				Petr Cech
--
Debian GNU/Linux maintainer - www.debian.{org,cz}
           cech@atrey.karlin.mff.cuni.cz