Should I Upgrade 5.4 -> 6.2?

[Kris Kennaway]

On Thu, Mar 15, 2007 at 04:47:06PM -0400, alex at schnarff.com wrote:
> First off, I want to thank the people who responded to my thread 
> "Stability Issues on a 5.4-RELEASE box" a couple of weeks ago; after 
> disabling hyperthreading, getting a clean run of Memtest back, and 
> doing some serious fsck'ing of the disks, the box appears to now be 
> completely stable. I'm still not sure which of the above fixed the 
> problem...but I'll take a stable system at this point. :-)
> 
> That said, in that thread I had asked about the advisability of 
> upgrading to 6.2, and it was intelligently pointed out that doing so in 
> pursuit of stability was a bad idea. Now that the box is stable, 
> though, I'm back to the same question: should I make the upgrade, and 
> if so, how should I do it?
> 
> My primary driver for doing so would be to keep current enough that I'm 
> still getting security and other patches on a regular basis, and that I 
> can upgrade my applications from ports as necessary. If this is not an 
> issue, then my only remaining concern would be that it's usually easier 
> to get support on lists like this if you're running a modern version of 
> the OS (that's certainly the case with the OpenBSD folks).
> 
> My primary concern with upgrading is that the box is in Portland, OR, 
> and I'm in Arlington, VA...and while the ISP is friendly, I doubt that 
> I could count on them for major system recovery if I botch something 
> during the upgrade. My other worry is that I don't want to break 
> existing apps if possible (the main one I'm concerned about is 
> Zope/Plone). This is a production box with moderate traffic, and it 
> would be a problem if there was extensive downtime.
> 
> Is it worth upgrading? If so, what's the best way to do so -- CVSup, or 
> some other way? Are there any major caveats if I do choose to upgrade 
> (or choose to stay with the existing OS)?

On general grounds it is well worth running 6.2 over 5.x - depending
on your workload you should see performance improvements, and support
for 6.2 is much better than for the legacy 5.x branch.

Kris