When to upgrade a server?

atmosx

atmosx

Hello,

I have a server running FreeBSD release-9.1. I'm doing updates manually approximately once a week and since (now) it's the only server that I've got, it's easy for me to monitor manually.

I was wondering, what is the best update policy. This is a production server, I have an application running on it, upon which depend program clients.

I would like to know when it's a good time to upgrade because I could leave the system as it is and just make security updates for the next couple of years. On the other hand, this way I will miss all new goodies that come with every FreeBSD release.

So what is a good update policy? Should I update to 9.2 or wait for 10 to come out and then perform a major update? What do other experienced admins do?

Thanks
 
atmosx said:
So what is a good update policy? Should I update to 9.2 or wait for 10 to come out and then perform a major update? What do other experienced admins do?
Click to expand...

It's actually your decision but its best to do a trial run on any updates/upgrades to be sure it works before deploying it on your production server. I wouldn't use FreeBSD 10.0-RELEASE for production server since it'll be bound to have bugs until most of them are fixed at 10.1 or later.

I had issues with ZFS in 9.0-RELEASE and 9.1-RELEASE until it was fixed in 9.1-STABLE.

Most web hosting providers use 8.x-RELEASE since it's extremely stable but it will be discontinued shortly after FreeBSD 10.0-RELEASE. FreeBSD usually support 2 major releases at the same time.
 
atmosx said:
I was wondering, what is the best update policy. This is a production server, I have an application running on it, upon which depend program clients.
Click to expand...
Well, the most important thing to realize here is that FreeBSD 9.1-RELEASE will be supported for well over a year from now. Just look at the security page where you can see an overview of the releases which are still supported.

As you can see the estimated End Of Life ("EOL") date for 9.1-RELEASE sits at the 31st of December, 2014. So that should give you plenty of time to plan an upgrade.

So the best update policy would be the moment when it suits you best to upgrade. I'd definitely start by becoming a little more familiar with some of the changes in version 9.2 and to study how much those would influence your setup.

Next I'd keep some proper backups in place and then basically perform the upgrade. Do make sure you meet all the requirements (free disk space, config file changes, etc.). Also make sure that you know up front how to roll things back.

But apart from that there is no definite answer here, apart from "Your best option is to upgrade before December 31, 2014" :-)

Hope this can help.
 
As others have noted, don't use 10.0-RELEASE on production but do use it to test. Upgrade some time before the EoL date to 9.2.

As for your ports, keep an eye on the vulnerabilities and only upgrade your ports when you run into bugs or if there's a security issue. This shouldn't happen often so there's no real need to update them every week.
 
Update to 9.2 and stay with it for now and keep your system up to date with freebsd-update(8) and upgrade to 9.3 and 9.4 if and when they come out. As others have noted FreeBSD 10.0 will not be exactly release quality because there will be so little time between the revision control branch from 10-CURRENT to release of 10.0 and many new features will not receive as much testing as one would like. Also 10.0 will not be an extended support release so it will be EoL'd pretty soon.
 
Thank you all for the pointers. I'll stick to 9.1 until Nov 2014 then and perform the update to 9.2. Thanks
 
When working in the NETWORKING field you never UPDATE right away LOL.
Some of my friend work areas are still using windows NT believe it or not.
 
GreenMeanie said:
When working in the NETWORKING field you never UPDATE right away LOL.
Some of my friend work areas are still using windows NT believe it or not.
Click to expand...

I just have a VPS running FreeBSD serving VPN and HTTPD for my clients and a couple of other services for personal use.

So I guess I can *wait* :-)
 
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