04-11-2011
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Join Date: Oct 2006
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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