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That heavily depends on distro. Debian upgrades "just work". Even had colleague accidentally upgrade 2 releases at once (put too new repo on one of the old ser

by ilyt 3y ago

That heavily depends on distro. Debian upgrades "just work". Even had colleague accidentally upgrade 2 releases at once (put too new repo on one of the old servers) and it worked without a hitch Ubuntu? eh, usually ? CentOS/RHEL/derivatives ? It isn't even supported as a feature. Both my desktop and NAS are going 10+ years with just dist-upgrade. Also few hundred servers at work where we migrated from CentOS (which was a chore to manage tbh).

kykeonaut 3y ago
To be fair, Debian used to work even for FreeBSD back in the day with Debian GNU/kFreeBSD.
- toast0 3y ago
  > To be fair, Debian used to work even for FreeBSD back in the day with Debian GNU/kFreeBSD. As both a Debian and FreeBSD person, I think I was uniquely in a position to like this, and it was awful circa 2012. Some stuff would work, and a lot of stuff didn't, because FreeBSD basic utilities weren't packaged and GNU versions didn't have full functionality: network configuration was difficult, lots of administration was also difficult. You ended up needing a FreeBSD chroot, and then you might as well use FreeBSD/FreeBSD.
turnsout 3y ago
That's interesting about Debian and dist-upgrade. I think I had assumed everyone had consolidated on Ubuntu, but every Ubuntu installation I've run has been a short-lived VPS, so I haven't had to think too much about long-term upgrades. But maybe that's the new mindset—just periodically wipe everything out and reinstall your application from a script/container/what-have-you.
- ilyt 3y ago
  That's certainly a way, especially that reinstall takes about as much as full upgrade. But I use configuration management anyway to keep the machines consistent, and, well, upgrade is less work than reinstall... especially if talking hardware that can take 5+ minutes just to reboot (which is like every actual enterprise server I saw).
messe 3y ago
I’m fairly sure RHEL has had in place upgrades for a few release now (at least going back to the 6 -> 7 transition, nearly a decade ago).

by ilyt 3y ago

kykeonaut 3y ago

To be fair, Debian used to work even for FreeBSD back in the day with Debian GNU/kFreeBSD.

toast0 3y ago
> To be fair, Debian used to work even for FreeBSD back in the day with Debian GNU/kFreeBSD. As both a Debian and FreeBSD person, I think I was uniquely in a position to like this, and it was awful circa 2012. Some stuff would work, and a lot of stuff didn't, because FreeBSD basic utilities weren't packaged and GNU versions didn't have full functionality: network configuration was difficult, lots of administration was also difficult. You ended up needing a FreeBSD chroot, and then you might as well use FreeBSD/FreeBSD.

turnsout 3y ago

That's interesting about Debian and dist-upgrade. I think I had assumed everyone had consolidated on Ubuntu, but every Ubuntu installation I've run has been a short-lived VPS, so I haven't had to think too much about long-term upgrades. But maybe that's the new mindset—just periodically wipe everything out and reinstall your application from a script/container/what-have-you.

ilyt 3y ago
That's certainly a way, especially that reinstall takes about as much as full upgrade. But I use configuration management anyway to keep the machines consistent, and, well, upgrade is less work than reinstall... especially if talking hardware that can take 5+ minutes just to reboot (which is like every actual enterprise server I saw).

messe 3y ago

I’m fairly sure RHEL has had in place upgrades for a few release now (at least going back to the 6 -> 7 transition, nearly a decade ago).