Re: [ANNOUNCE] Vendor kernels unpakced

[Marco Colombo <marco@esi.it>]

On Sun, 12 Aug 2001 arjan@fenrus.demon.nl wrote:

> In article <Pine.LNX.4.33.0108121607480.10511-100000@Megathlon.ESI> you wrote:
> > On Sat, 11 Aug 2001, Joseph Andrew Knapka wrote:
>
> >> Marco Colombo wrote:
>
> > I trust Red Hat in that 2.2.19-6.2.7 (or whatever) is better than
> > 2.2.19-6.2.1.  Systems are simply too complex for me to believe I
>
> Well, while I recommend updating kernels when vendors release them, reading
> the releasenotes that go with them and deciding, based on that, if you want
> to upgrade....

This means that:

1 - you perfectly understand what every single vendor patch did in the
    old kernel, and you understand what the new patches do in the new
    kernel;

2 - you know the above for *every* package you're interested in;

3 - you know all the possible interactions between packages.

True, I don't run X on remote servers, I don't install it and I don't
care when a new update is released for it.

But I need to keep apache, php, postgresql, sendmail, imapd, bind, squid,
samba and a few others updated, as a minimum. I know the are tested before
release, but on fully updated systems. I would be a huge amount of work
to test them with every possibile combination of updated and old packages.

So the latest php I believe is tested with the latest apache, the latest
postgresql, the latest imapd, the latest openldap, on the latest
kernel and linked against the latest glibc. It is true the most of the
times they interact in a clean way (user space apps vs. user space apps
use protocols, user space apps vs. kernel use syscall API) but I can't
bet on that.

So selective upgrades are not an easy way to go. I do *install* only what
I need, but I keep all the installed software updated. My job is to
run systems, not to make 'yet another linux distribution'.

Of course that is quite far from the true, in that I sometime use different
sw. E.g my imap server is Cyrus IMAPd, and the RPM is derived both by
RH powertools and my own ones I used in the past. I also use to keep
sendmail updated with the latest sendmail.org release, so I run 8.11.5
instead of RH 8.9.3. It is somewhat a different distribution, and I do
keep the burden to make the RPMs interact (I had to mantain a db3 RPM
for a while, then I had to convert all my RPMs to the RH official update).

I think I'm able to make decisions about IMAPd and sendmail, since I know
the two quite well. I would be impossible to gain the same level of
knowledge on *every* package installed in a server. At some point I need
to trust someone else. Otherwise I'd have to mantain myself all the sw
I use.

The above is expecially true for the kernel, which is more complex and
obscure than other average packages.

.TM.
-- 
      ____/  ____/   /
     /      /       /			Marco Colombo
    ___/  ___  /   /		      Technical Manager
   /          /   /			 ESI s.r.l.
 _____/ _____/  _/		       Colombo@ESI.it

-
Kernelnewbies: Help each other learn about the Linux kernel.
Archive:       http://mail.nl.linux.org/kernelnewbies/
IRC Channel:   irc.openprojects.net / #kernelnewbies
Web Page:      http://www.kernelnewbies.org/