Re: How do you avoid server/firewall downtime?
On Sun, 27 Feb 2011 23:49:58 -0600
Jason Hsu <jhsu802701@jasonhsu.com> wrote:
>> able to refute this. That said, I see that many other people (most
> of whom have more experience than I have) are also having difficulty
> with the upgrade from Lenny to Squeeze. In the ideal world, I can
> always avoid messing up. In the real world, I need to make sure that
> my screw-ups do NOT disrupt the system.
>
You do it in the same ways that it has always been done.
As you say, your own system is not that valuable, but as you also say,
you can't treat a real business system that way.
First, any computer you manage on behalf of a client *must* be capable
of being restored from a recent backup if the hardware catches fire,
or must be completely expendable, such as a workstation. Not only that,
you must be sure the restore strategy works, and I'm afraid that really
does mean trying it. And that's all the time, not just around an
upgrade.
Second, you make sure your own system has everything installed that
your client's does, and you make very sure you know all the issues with
the software before you go near the client's machine. Even then, of
course, it's unlikely you'll have the same hardware, but you should
make a special effort to have a (possibly spare) video card/chipset that
is the same. Nothing slows down a troubleshooting session like the lack
of a display, and that is regrettably common after a major upheaval in a
Linux system (OK, less so now than it was). Well, maybe a failure to
boot (yes, I'm looking at you, grub2).
But all the preparation in the world doesn't guarantee success, so you
do the job during downtime, possibly at the weekend. If you've got
trouble and you're running out of time, you try hard to work out what's
going wrong and then restore from backup. You go away and try to work
out a strategy for getting it right next weekend.
And so on. It's all common sense really. It's the same as Windows
people have been doing for decades, and licensing and 'security' issues
mean they have it much worse than Linux people. It's worse still with
Small Business Server, a heavily customised and limited version of
Windows Server intended to hang on to the business being lost to Linux.
The official, considered advice of SBS MVPs on restoring from backup is
to buy really good hardware in the first place. I'm not joking.
--
Joe
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