How long do you go without upgrading FreeBSD to a newer release?

[Dan Naumov]

Hello folks

Just a thought/question that has recently come to my mind: How long do
you usually wait until upgrading to a newer release of FreeBSD? I am
sure there are lots of people who upgrade straight away, but what
about the opposite? What's your oldest currently running installation,
do you have any issues and are you planning on an upgrade or do you
intend to leave it running as is until some critical piece of hardware
breaks down, requiring a replacement?

The reason I am asking is: I have a 8.0 installation that I am VERY
happy with. It runs like clockwork. eveything is properly configured
and highly locked down, all services accessible to the outside world
are running inside ezjail-managed jails on top of ZFS, meaning it's
also very trivial to restore jails via snapshots, should the need ever
arise. I don't really see myself NEEDING to upgrade for many years.
even long after security updates stop being made for 8.0, since I can
see myself being able to at least work my way around arising security
issues with my configuration and to break into the real host OS and
cause real damage would mean you have to be either really really
dedicated, have a gun and know where I live or serve me with a
warrant.

Do you liva by the "If it's not broken, don't fix it" mantra or do you
religiously keep your OS installations up to date?


- Sincerely,
Dan Naumov