[Cialug] Upgrade questions

[Stuart Thiessen]

Well, I'm mostly concerned that with the pace of open source updates, 
that sooner or later program A requires Dependency B which requires 
Dependency C which requires OS update D which requires ...

Add to that keeping up with security updates ... Since I am not a 
full-time Linux administrator, I don't want to have an old system that 
is exploitable, but I am not always confident that I am informed enough 
to know that I am up to date.  I have my 9.2 system autoupdating itself 
from the SuSE online update, but that's as far as I have gone.  
Sometimes I feel, "Well, maybe just installing a new OS every so often 
is more secure."  At the same time, I risk other programs, etc breaking 
because of the dependency issues.

I just wasn't sure how most people handle this kind of thing.

Thanks,

Stuart
On Dec 20, 2005, at 11:38, Dave J. Hala Jr. wrote:

> Are you having trouble getting patches? Are you having version issues?
> Are you going to have these issues in the near future? (1yr?)
>
> If not, I think that old saying goes: "If it ain't broke, don't fix it"
>
>
>
> On Tue, 2005-12-20 at 11:33, Stuart Thiessen wrote:
>> Hi! I wanted to ask a question that is surely a newbie question ...
>>
>> Ok, I have a server running SuSE 9.2.  I know that is an older version
>> so I was thinking maybe I should upgrade it to newer specs to avoid
>> patching issues, etc.
>>
>> My main question is this ... how do I really do upgrades of the
>> operating system without it affecting my data and configuration files
>> for different services?  Have they come up with a methodology by which
>> you can update your system well and inform you of the gotchas, or you
>> just have to read up on all the new versions and manually update each
>> program that creates a gotcha situation?
>>
>> On my particular system, I have /, /boot, /opt, /usr, /home, /var all
>> on different partitions. I am assuming if I upgraded to a newer 
>> version
>> of SuSE or decided to go with a different distribution, that I could
>> just update all the other partitions but leave /home untouched, right?
>> What about httpd configurations or other server configs? I know I
>> should back them up before upgrading, but then just restore them on 
>> top
>> of the upgrade or is there a better system for managing these kinds of
>> situations so that you don't have to go server by server and
>> restore/fix everything?
>>
>> Does this make sense?
>>
>> Stuart
>>
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> -- 
>
> Open Source Information Systems, Inc. (OSIS)
> Dave J. Hala Jr., President <dave at osis.us>
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