Bob Proulx wrote:
Tim Kelley wrote:I'm a server admin for a living, for the last 25 years, I mean data centers and lately, cloud. There a very few conditions that would make me dist-upgrade a server, that is absolutely primitive. Servers are created from scratch in minutes at will from an SCMS or automated install and if not, you are wrong!So a client comes to you as a professional admin. Let's say they have an aging Squeeze LTS based web server. They want to move to Jessie which you may have heard is recently released. Would you re-install their system to Jessie and ask them to reinstall their web site from scratch? Or would you spend twenty minutes upgrading from Squeeze 6 to Wheezy 7 and then from Wheezy 7 to Jessie 8? I know what I would do. I would upgrade. (After ensuring a proper backup. Backups are needed regardless.) Debian is all about being able to upgrade.
I know what I would do with our servers: - for our virtualization environment (Xen) - I'd reinstall from scratch - for our VMs - I'd rebuild each one from scratchIn my experience, lots of glitches accumulate from upgrade to upgrade. Better to take the opportunity to build a clean system.
I might add that this is particularly the case with Jessie - in that systemd changes so many things that I wouldn't trust an automated process in any way, shape, manner, or form. (Of course, I'm REALLY conservative - I'm just getting ready to upgrade some systems to Wheezy. From there, I'm seriously considering a migration to BSD.)
Miles Fidelman -- In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is. .... Yogi Berra