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

Edwin Groothuis edwin at mavetju.org
Thu Jun 5 00:01:37 UTC 2008


On Wed, Jun 04, 2008 at 10:43:27AM -1000, Clifton Royston wrote:
> On Wed, Jun 04, 2008 at 11:00:41AM -0700, Doug Barton wrote:
> > Jo Rhett wrote:
> ...
> > >But given that 6.3 is still experiencing bugs with things that 
> > >are working fine and stable in 6.2, this is a pretty hard case to make.
> > 
> > I admit to not having been following 6.x too closely, but are these 
> > things that have been reported, or problems you're having personally?
>  
>   Speaking just for myself, I'd love to get a general response from
> people who have run servers on both as to whether 6.3 is on average
> more stable than 6.2.  I really haven't gotten any clear impression as
> to this, either from posts on -hackers or -stable, and I believe I
> asked a couple times.  I've seen comments that 6.3 should be
> considerably more stable than 6.2, but also complaints about bugs such
> as Jo is commenting on, and I have not seen much committed in the way
> of errata fixes for 6.3 since its release.

We have about 40 servers which were running 6.1 and 6.2 and the
seven busy ones (application servers which do mail and proxying,
and the database servers) hung *dead* every week. One per day.
Luckely they were all redundant etc and remotely rebootable, but
it was a nightmare for half a year. A handfull of patches (mutex-based)
helped a lot, but still it was too much for my liking.

The upgrade to 6.3 fixed *everything*, these seven servers now have
uptimes of (since february) again. (The updates were scheduled in
November as xmas-break updates, so imagine me getting more and more
nervous when things got dragged out).

So 6.3 saved my sanity :-)

Edwin
-- 
Edwin Groothuis      |            Personal website: http://www.mavetju.org
edwin at mavetju.org    |              Weblog: http://www.mavetju.org/weblog/


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