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

[Manfred Usselmann]

Hi,

On Thu, 05 Jun 2008 13:31:44 -0500
Paul Schmehl <pschmehl_lists at tx.rr.com> wrote:

> --On Thursday, June 05, 2008 17:53:01 +0100 Tom Evans 
> <tevans.uk at googlemail.com> wrote:
> >
> > I think that, especially with open source products, there is a large
> > emphasis on testing in your own environments, and choosing the
> > 'correct' version of a particular software package is important.
> > For example, at $JOB, we had a lot of servers running 6.1 as it was
> > an extended lifetime release, so no point jumping to 6.2, instead
> > we waited for 6.3 to pass our integration testing.
> >
> 
> Not everyone has those kinds of resources.  The domain I'm referring
> to is a hobby site, run by a husband and wife.  They started with
> shared hosting and moved to a dedicated box when I volunteered to
> help with the backend work.  For several years we ran one server
> hosting dns, imaps, smtps, mail lists and websites.
> 
> Yes, it's not ideal, but when you have zero income you do what you
> can. Testing like you describe is out of the question.
> 
> We now have the embarrassment of riches of two servers; one for web
> and the old one for the rest.  The old box is still running 5.4
> SECURITY.  The new box is running 6.1.  I'd *like* to upgrade both
> boxes, and the older box can go offline comfortably for several hours
> without anyone but me noticing.  But if the web box goes down for 30
> seconds, queries from the users start pouring in.

What you are saying sounds like a contradiction to me. On one side it
is just a hobby site and generates no income and on the other hand it
is a critical server with millions of hits and the box can't even go
down for a short time.

What happens in case lets say your harddisk crashes? Something which is
not an exactly rare case...

If the users are not paying for the service they should be able to
accept a downtime, may it be scheduled or even completely unexpected.
Or pay / donate for a more reliable service (Redundant server as hot
standby / testbed etc.). 

Manfred

-- 
Manfred Usselmann <usselmann.m at icg-online.de>