Upgrades vs Reinstalls (was Re: sarge/woody upgrade - boot problem)
On Mar 01 2007, Ron Johnson wrote:
> >
> > *sigh* You are the second person to suggest in effect never actually
> > upgrading a debian system,
>
> We'd *never* say that.
Well, what the other fellow said was that in his shop, they prefer
to reinstall from scratch, at least when going from woody to sarge,
though they have successfully upgraded a few non-critical systems.
(I got the impression that upgrades were too exciting to do on
anything where there was any time criticality.)
That's also what I've done, 3 times out of 4 - create the new box -
often with improved hardware, install the current version, get
everything working, then copy data and (usually) change name and IP
address to match the one being replaced. That's the plan with my
current etch system - replacement of a sarge system that needs a
hardware upgrade anyway.
> > or at least never going from woody to
> > sarge.
>
> Sure we *would* have, and we *did*. 21 months ago, when Stable
> Sarge was new.
>
> Now, you've got to upgrade from Woody to Sarge and then soon upgrade
> from Sarge to Etch. That 2-step process is much slower and
> error-prone than the one-step wipe-and-install Etch.
True enough. On the other hand, it's also more educational, and this
box is not very critical, so I may just use it as a training
exercise.
> Keeping up with Etch/testing on a bi-weekly basis (famous last
> words) shouldn't be too onerous.
Well, I'm not exactly the world's most experienced systems
administrator - in fact, the term "incompetent amateur" is perhaps
more like it ;-) So it might be a bit more onerous for me than for
others.
--
Arlie
(Arlie Stephens arlie@worldash.org)
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