Re: named failing to restart after updating to RHEL3 U4

[Tom Sightler <ttsig tuxyturvy com>]

On Wed, 2004-12-22 at 11:09 +0100, Tommy Davis wrote:
> We run up2date via cron on one of our development servers. After upgrading to U4 
> last night, named was shut down as part of the upgrade, but was never started again.
>
> The logs show no sign of a failure to start named, and it started manually 
> without a hitch.
>
> Has this occured to anyone else while upgrading to U4?

After manually installing the patches our named servers were also stopped.  We also had to rename the named.conf.rpmsave file.  This appeared to be caused by the caching-nameserver rpm rather than the bind rpms however.

> On a related note: I wonder if people running productions server have the 
> automatic update enabled. It seems to me that once in a while an update breaks 
> things.
>
> What's your strategy for updates? I suppose you have to test all updates on a 
> separate server.

I would never configure my production servers for automatic updates, especially considering how flaky updates from Redhat for RHEL3 tend to be (I had much better success with RHEL2.1).  Constantly changing behavior in basic packages like CUPS and Samba (particularly winbind), bugs in new kernels (if I had installed the disaster that was the 2.4.21-20.EL kernel on our most critical production Oracle servers I might be looking for a new job).

It used to be that updates for Linux were a breeze, but I've almost gotten to the point that I dread installing updates on Linux even more that applying the latest Windows service packs.

Later,
Tom