What is your upgrade strategy? Post: 302512794

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Top Forums UNIX for Advanced & Expert Users What is your upgrade strategy? Post 302512794 by pileofrogs on Monday 11th of April 2011 03:59:57 PM

04-11-2011

Registered User

What is your upgrade strategy?

Hi, all.

I'm a unix sysadmin at a community college and I've been doing this for about 10 years. I've been thinking and I realised I spend most of my time worrying about upgrades. By upgrades, I mean anything where I have to interrupt service to switch to a different way of providing that service. So, I mean OS upgrades, software upgrades, hardware upgrades, moving stuff, configuration changes etc... etc.... I don't want downtime and I don't want to roll-out untested stuff or stuff that will surprise and confuse my users. So, I don't want to have downtime while I do an upgrade and then test it and I also don't want to upgrade stuff in place on a live server.

My general strategy has been to have two servers for everything. One serves content while the other gets upgrades and then I switch. Over the years many programs, systems, shortcuts, hacks and cludges have accumulated to make this better. And now, ten years later, I'm wondering if all those hacks and cludges are me re-inventing the wheel and there is a better overall strategy to this kind of thing, an upgrade management system or philosophy or discipline or something like that.

Like I said, I'm at a community college so we're pretty small, but I'm interested in what anyone of any size does.

Thoughts? What do you do?

Thanks!
-Pileofrogs

pileofrogs

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dh_systemd_start

DH_SYSTEMD_START(1)						     Debhelper						       DH_SYSTEMD_START(1)

NAME

       dh_systemd_start - start/stop/restart systemd unit files

SYNOPSIS

       dh_systemd_start [debhelperoptions] [--restart-after-upgrade] [--no-stop-on-upgrade] [unitfile...]

DESCRIPTION

       dh_systemd_start is a debhelper program that is responsible for starting/stopping or restarting systemd unit files in case no corresponding
       sysv init script is available.

       As with dh_installinit, the unit file is stopped before upgrades and started afterwards (unless --restart-after-upgrade is specified, in
       which case it will only be restarted after the upgrade).  This logic is not used when there is a corresponding SysV init script because
       invoke-rc.d performs the stop/start/restart in that case.

OPTIONS

       --restart-after-upgrade
	   Do not stop the unit file until after the package upgrade has been completed.  This is the default behaviour in compat 10.

	   In earlier compat levels the default was to stop the unit file in the prerm, and start it again in the postinst.

	   This can be useful for daemons that should not have a possibly long downtime during upgrade. But you should make sure that the daemon
	   will not get confused by the package being upgraded while it's running before using this option.

       --no-restart-after-upgrade
	   Undo a previous --restart-after-upgrade (or the default of compat 10).  If no other options are given, this will cause the service to
	   be stopped in the prerm script and started again in the postinst script.

       -r, --no-stop-on-upgrade, --no-restart-on-upgrade
	   Do not stop service on upgrade.

       --no-start
	   Do not start the unit file after upgrades and after initial installation (the latter is only relevant for services without a
	   corresponding init script).

NOTES

       Note that this command is not idempotent. dh_prep(1) should be called between invocations of this command (with the same arguments).
       Otherwise, it may cause multiple instances of the same text to be added to maintainer scripts.

       Note that dh_systemd_start should be run after dh_installinit so that it can detect corresponding SysV init scripts. The default sequence
       in dh does the right thing, this note is only relevant when you are calling dh_systemd_start manually.

SEE ALSO

       debhelper(7)

AUTHORS

       pkg-systemd-maintainers@lists.alioth.debian.org

11.1.6ubuntu2							    2018-05-10						       DH_SYSTEMD_START(1)