BEWARE upgrading Horde System

[Nikolas Britton]

On 4/9/06, Ted Mittelstaedt <tedm at toybox.placo.com> wrote:
>
[snipped]
>
> I have never understood the demand for being able to do an inplace
> upgrade of applications or of the operating system, and I've seen
> enormous trouble with servers that people do this with, under Windows
> as well as FreeBSD.
>
> Furthermore, by the time the software on the server is old, the hardware
> is ready to be retired in favor of shiny new hardware that is a lot
> faster.  This is also very true of Windows servers too.
>
> This gets back to what I was saying with professional-vs-amateur
> approach.  A professional approach to a server is to plan for it
> to live a certain life then you scrap it, or at the least nuke and
> repave it for something less demanding.  The car-rental companies
> have been doing this with cars for years, and all the used car buyers
> can never understand why a car rental companies sell perfectly
> good cars with a lot of years of life left in them.
>
> The amateur approach is to build the server then wring every last
> day of life out of it.  Patch and patch it over and over and over
> and upgrade it over and over and over, until it just won't work anymore.
> Hell, people were complaining that FreeBSD 6.0 wouldn't run on a
> 80386!!!!  That's a total amateur approach.
>

I think your mixing up the professional approach with the I'm not
paying the bills approach, that "shiny new hardware that is a lot
faster" comes with a price tag attached to it and the price attached
to that tag in relation to other factors determines the route to be
taken. You do have, at the very least, a basic fiduciary
responsibility to your employer, and in the context of business it's
money.