Online remote upgrade
For those of you looking at why I use Annvix, let
me elaborate how important EOL and online upgrade for me. And to me,
annvix does the job for me.
Over my 10 years of experiences with the servers, and I am going to talk
about the Linux as OS Three things are probably the worst
nightmare and most important to me as the administrator.
1. EOL of the distribution, which means mandatory upgrade if I want to
keep the software up to date (for security reasons)
2. Ease of the upgrade process.
3. Is online upgrade possible (or must be offline)
Item 2 and 3 are usually go hand to hand though. For first item, EOL of
most of the ‘free’ distributions are about 1 - 1.5 years. Which means,
when you finally get a version working (that’s about 3-6 months after
distribution is released), you only have less than 1 year left. That
means you’ll start preparing a upgrade when the EOL comes if you really
want to keep the security patch up to date and be able to sleep well at
night. This really force me to do upgrade almost every 1 - 1.5 years,
and it really too much work…..
so, since the upgrade is necessary to make sure the system is ‘free’
from hackers, how easy the upgrade process becomes important. For most
of the ‘Bigger’ distributions, due to its ‘HUGE’ and complex nature,
upgrade usually breaks badly and I normally just install a fresh copy of
new version (usually on the new harddisk) and just port the data
manually afterwards. The whole thing usually takes about 1 full day (if
I am lucky), and about a week to make sure everything works.
Finally, since I have several machines co-lo at else where. (Right now,
I live in Taiwan, and couple of my servers are still in the U.S.) To be
able to do remote online upgrade becomes very important. I can afford to
call the ISP to reboot the machine, but there is no way they will be
able to upgrade for me. Thanks to Annvix, which supports online upgrade,
and I have successfully upgrade from version 1.0 -> 1.1 -> 1.2 -> 2.0
and I am looking forward to the new release next year. Yes, we all know
eventually I’ll need to do fresh install just to cleanup everything, but
because of remote online upgrade, it really makes EOL of the server
software to 3-4 years (at least) which really ease my job.
If you run production servers 24/7, you’ll understand how cool this feature is!
