Who was the mental genius

[Michelle Sullivan]

Paul Schmehl wrote:
>
> I appreciate the advice.  I've elected to setup an alternate form of
> backup (using rsync over ssh to backup each server to its sibling) so
> I can upgrade to 8.4 without worrying about a loss.  Once that's
> complete, I'll get the new backup system in place (using Storgrid
> backing up to a SAN at the hosting provider).
>
> After that I can comfortably move to 9 or 10.  I don't like running
> "bleeding edge" releases on production servers.  This work I'm doing
> is entirely voluntary, for a hobby website with a small budget, so I
> have to be very careful about not breaking anything.
>
> When I installed one of these servers 9 wouldn't even install (missing
> RAID drivers), which is why I used 8.
>
My issue is some of the production servers I am running if I perform an
'OS Reload' Softlayer (the hosting provider) will only allow me to
reload with 7.x releases...  totally unsupported.  Others only 7.2 or
8.4, others 8.4, 9.0 or 10.0...  So last production reload I did after
freebsd-update screwed up (and it was probably user error (or distro
error - Softlayer's setup) not a problem with freebsd-update - going
from 7.2->8.4) I had to reload with 9.0 and freebsd-update to 9.2 (10.0
was not even an option on that server - just 2 months ago)

FreeBSD maintainer problem?  No
User (me) problem? No and Yes (no because I didn't do anything, yes
because a production server went down)
Softlayer problem?  Probably - but then they give you 20+ OS options
mostly Windows and (paid support) $penguin OSs ... FreeBSD seems not a
priority for them (and they don't have any other *BSDs) so can you blame
them? (probably getting kickbacks for the support contracts)

There isn't an easy answer, everyone is trying to do the right thing,
but I feel your pain (mentioned elsewhere in this thread.)

Michelle

-- 
Michelle Sullivan
http://www.mhix.org/