Re: named failing to restart after updating to RHEL3 U4

["Lee Whatley, Contractor" <lwhatley ctr navo hpc mil>]

Josh Kelley wrote:
> I feel like a novice for asking, but what's the easiest way to do this?  
> I know that I should be testing updates before I install them on 
> production servers, but I've always felt like the headache of (a) 
> keeping a test server with a configuration that's relatively similar to 
> my mail server and web server and file servers and everything else and 
> (b) figuring out a suite of tests that's reasonably likely to hit 
> functionality that might break is great enough that I instead just 
> install updates without testing and hope that I can catch whatever 
> problems occur before people get too upset.  Is there some easy testing 
> technique that I'm missing?

Well, let me first preface this by saying that I am not an expert by any 
means, so anything I do to test isn't necessairly the best way to do it.

I recommend having a couple of "test" machines that have pretty close to 
FULL RedHat installs (at least install everything you would have on each 
production machine) and are on a private network. When errata are 
released, connect then to the public network to run "up2date".  After 
the packages are installed, again put them back on the private network. 
 How you test after this mostly depends on what packages were updated. 
 Obviously you'll want to make sure that all services you want running 
in production are still running on the test machine.  Make sure that 
these services can be stopped and started and that they come up clean 
after a reboot.  You'll also want to check file permissions for changes 
and log files for errors.  As far as "trying to break stuff" goes, again 
that depends on what packages you are testing.  I'd suggest Postal for 
sendmail and ab for Apache. (sorry, I don't have the links for these 
off-hand).  You can test things like ssh and such between the two test 
boxes.  For testing the kernel I usually just do a reboot and then try 
to run programs that produce a relatively high load/disk activity and 
leave it sitting for a day or two.

I hope that gets you started,
-Lee