<story><title>Long term support considered harmful</title><url>http://www.tedunangst.com/flak/post/long-term-support-considered-harmful</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>edofic</author><text>&amp;quot;Since there&amp;#x27;s no way to roll back server upgrades&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;It is if you run a modern filesystem like ZFS or btrfs. You just do a cheap snapshot before upgrading(can be automated) and roll back if there are problems. Even works with lvm.</text></item><item><author>thaumaturgy</author><text>&amp;gt; &lt;i&gt;Frequent upgrades amortize the cost and ensure that regressions are caught early. No one upgrade is likely to end in disaster because there simply isn’t enough change for that to happen.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;Oh, how I wish this were true.&lt;p&gt;For what it&amp;#x27;s worth, it&amp;#x27;s pretty true as far as OpenBSD is concerned, in my experience. But OpenBSD is the exception here, not the rule. Everywhere else, developers all seem to have embraced &amp;quot;break early, break often&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;Eventually you get burned. For me, it was a routine should-have-been-minor web server update where one of the packages I relied on suddenly became unsupported and &lt;i&gt;every single hosted site stopped working&lt;/i&gt;. Since there&amp;#x27;s no way to roll back server upgrades, I had a marathon night involving building a new server stack and migrating all hosted sites there by 8 a.m.&lt;p&gt;But you can&amp;#x27;t yell at anybody when that happens, because the answer&amp;#x27;s always the same: it&amp;#x27;s not the developers&amp;#x27; fault.&lt;p&gt;Who really believes sysadmins wouldn&amp;#x27;t update everything all the time if they could? Old, dodgy, out-of-date servers exist exactly because updates are butthole-puckering, because everyone&amp;#x27;s been burned at least once by a &amp;quot;minor&amp;quot; update, and because once the damage is done, undoing it is horrifyingly difficult.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>KaiserPro</author><text>Sadly as zfs isn&amp;#x27;t as widely available as I&amp;#x27;d like, you can use LVM to provide snapshots.&lt;p&gt;Its not as friendly as ZFS snapshots, but it is at least available in centos 5 &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.centos.org/docs/5/html/Cluster_Logical_Volume_Manager/snapshot_command.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.centos.org&amp;#x2F;docs&amp;#x2F;5&amp;#x2F;html&amp;#x2F;Cluster_Logical_Volume_Ma...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;(sadly somethings need long term support)</text></comment>
<story><title>Long term support considered harmful</title><url>http://www.tedunangst.com/flak/post/long-term-support-considered-harmful</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>edofic</author><text>&amp;quot;Since there&amp;#x27;s no way to roll back server upgrades&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;It is if you run a modern filesystem like ZFS or btrfs. You just do a cheap snapshot before upgrading(can be automated) and roll back if there are problems. Even works with lvm.</text></item><item><author>thaumaturgy</author><text>&amp;gt; &lt;i&gt;Frequent upgrades amortize the cost and ensure that regressions are caught early. No one upgrade is likely to end in disaster because there simply isn’t enough change for that to happen.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;Oh, how I wish this were true.&lt;p&gt;For what it&amp;#x27;s worth, it&amp;#x27;s pretty true as far as OpenBSD is concerned, in my experience. But OpenBSD is the exception here, not the rule. Everywhere else, developers all seem to have embraced &amp;quot;break early, break often&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;Eventually you get burned. For me, it was a routine should-have-been-minor web server update where one of the packages I relied on suddenly became unsupported and &lt;i&gt;every single hosted site stopped working&lt;/i&gt;. Since there&amp;#x27;s no way to roll back server upgrades, I had a marathon night involving building a new server stack and migrating all hosted sites there by 8 a.m.&lt;p&gt;But you can&amp;#x27;t yell at anybody when that happens, because the answer&amp;#x27;s always the same: it&amp;#x27;s not the developers&amp;#x27; fault.&lt;p&gt;Who really believes sysadmins wouldn&amp;#x27;t update everything all the time if they could? Old, dodgy, out-of-date servers exist exactly because updates are butthole-puckering, because everyone&amp;#x27;s been burned at least once by a &amp;quot;minor&amp;quot; update, and because once the damage is done, undoing it is horrifyingly difficult.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>thaumaturgy</author><text>Ooh, thanks. That&amp;#x27;s a good idea. I&amp;#x27;d never considered running ZFS on my small servers.</text></comment>