[Discuss] UEFI

[jabr at gapps.blu.org (John Abreau)]

Blindly upgrading a server as-is, without knowing what's running on it, is a recipe for disaster. Such a system suffers a serious entropy risk, and ultimately becomes unmaintainable. Eventually it will suffer a disaster that will be unrecoverable.

I don't use the /etc backups directly, but only as documentation of how the old system was configured. Same with the list of packages that were installed on the old system. 

If possible, I first do a dry run by building a test server that duplicates the production server to be upgraded. 




On Oct 24, 2013, at 12:00 PM, Derek Martin <invalid at pizzashack.org> wrote:

> On Thu, Oct 24, 2013 at 06:42:15AM -0400, John Abreau wrote:
>> On Wed, Oct 23, 2013 at 12:41 PM, Bill Bogstad <bogstad at pobox.com> wrote:
>>> But I would still  lose my DHCP, internal DNS, NFS, NTP, multiple user
>>> account passwords, printer configs, crontabs, etc., etc., etc.; if I
>>> did this.   Even though I only have a few machines, I don't run them
>>> as if they were single-user Internet browsing machines.
>> 
>> Everything you list there (other than "etc., etc., etc) is under either
>> /etc or /var/named.  Backup both of those as well, and you've got
>> all your config data.
> 
> Welll, sort of.  If you're upgrading your system, many of these files
> will likely contain config which is obsoleted by your new versions, or
> even may configure components which have been replaced entirely by
> something newer.
> 
> This is unfortunately not an easy task, in the upgrade case.  First
> doing an OS upgrade using your vendor's preferred method may help,
> though I'm sure most of us have seen that result in disaster. =8^)
> 
> 
>> I generally also run "rpm -qa > ~/ALL-INSTALLED-RPMS" before
>> installing the newest Fedora or CentOS, so I retain a record of what
>> packages had been installed prior to the upgrade.
> 
> This is a good idea; I've done this myself in the past too.  Though, I
> don't use this approach anymore because I've found that I was
> installing a lot of packages I never used...  I now just install
> things when I actually want to use them.
> 
> -- 
> Derek D. Martin    http://www.pizzashack.org/   GPG Key ID: 0xDFBEAD02
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