Re: challenge: end of life for 6.2 is premature with buggy 6.3

Hi,

On Thu, 05 Jun 2008 13:31:44 -0500
Paul Schmehl <pschmehl_lists@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

--On Thursday, June 05, 2008 17:53:01 +0100 Tom Evans
<tevans.uk@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

I think that, especially with open source products, there is a large
emphasis on testing in your own environments, and choosing the
'correct' version of a particular software package is important.
For example, at $JOB, we had a lot of servers running 6.1 as it was
an extended lifetime release, so no point jumping to 6.2, instead
we waited for 6.3 to pass our integration testing.


Not everyone has those kinds of resources. The domain I'm referring
to is a hobby site, run by a husband and wife. They started with
shared hosting and moved to a dedicated box when I volunteered to
help with the backend work. For several years we ran one server
hosting dns, imaps, smtps, mail lists and websites.

Yes, it's not ideal, but when you have zero income you do what you
can. Testing like you describe is out of the question.

We now have the embarrassment of riches of two servers; one for web
and the old one for the rest. The old box is still running 5.4
SECURITY. The new box is running 6.1. I'd *like* to upgrade both
boxes, and the older box can go offline comfortably for several hours
without anyone but me noticing. But if the web box goes down for 30
seconds, queries from the users start pouring in.

What you are saying sounds like a contradiction to me. On one side it
is just a hobby site and generates no income and on the other hand it
is a critical server with millions of hits and the box can't even go
down for a short time.

What happens in case lets say your harddisk crashes? Something which is
not an exactly rare case...

If the users are not paying for the service they should be able to
accept a downtime, may it be scheduled or even completely unexpected.
Or pay / donate for a more reliable service (Redundant server as hot
standby / testbed etc.).

Manfred

--
Manfred Usselmann <usselmann.m@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
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