[wplug-internet] CentOS 5.4 released

Vance Kochenderfer vkochend at nyx.net
Fri Oct 30 00:24:23 EDT 2009


Michael Semcheski <mhsemcheski at gmail.com> wrote:
> My recommendation on how to proceed is:
> 
> 1. Setup a new, pristine linode instance.
> 2. Get everything setup on that new instance.
> 3. Transfer over the various databases.
> 4. Point the DNS at the new instance.
> 5. Document every step we had to take to through steps 2 through 4.

I guess I don't follow.  The update *should* be painless, and
while there's some griping, other Linode users are having success:
<http://www.linode.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=4753>
<http://www.linode.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=4755>

My note was just to point out that the updates shouldn't simply be
blindly applied - whoever does it should know they're going to be
available for some period of time in case there is a glitch that
needs to be fixed.

If we want to go the paranoid route, we could do:
1. Clone existing Linode (A) to another one (B).
2. Update A.
3. If all hell breaks loose, clone B back to A and figure out the
   problem at our leisure.  Otherwise, enjoy the updated goodness
   of A, and drop B.

> I know there are certain things I would do differently if setting up from
> scratch, specifically I would have either used a Fedora instance rather than
> CentOS,

I thought the point of choosing an enterprise distro was to get
long-term updates?  Fedora only provides maintenance for ~13
months, then you have to move to a later release.  That's fine if
upgrading from release X to X+1 or X+2 works smoothly, but my
understanding is that's not always been the case with Fedora.

But I admit I haven't been following it closely.

> or I would have installed the Fedora-Enterprise Linux repos, and
> installed media wiki from there.  Either way, I'd prefer if our mediawiki
> installation was based on a Fedora package.

If Fedora packages will work on CentOS, I think it's possible to
enable that repository in yum.  You can use priorities to make it
the last choice after the base repo and rpmforge.

If we're seriously discussing jumping ship, another possibility is
Ubuntu Server LTS - I've had good success with it on another
system, and pretty much anything we'd need (except maybe
monkeybot) seems to exist in the universe repos.  Yet another
option could be Debian stable.

Vance Kochenderfer        |  "Get me out of these ropes and into a
vkochend at nyx.net          |   good belt of Scotch"    -Nick Danger


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