Fedora Core 2 AMD 64 Bit: good platform for heavy load mail server?

[Scot L. Harris]

On Mon, 2004-09-27 at 11:07, Tobias Weisserth wrote:

> 
> Say, how do you handle the short upgrade cycles of Fedora? Core 3 is nearing 
> completion and it is only a matter of time until the Core 2 lifecycle reaches 
> an end. Is upgrading to a newer Core release painless and can it be done 
> without risking the availability of the services?

Any kind of upgrade, particularly version upgrades, have a certain
amount of risk involved.  You will risk the availability of any services
running on a box when you upgrade.  You can mitigate the risk by doing
your homework, read all the release notes, review all critical
applications and services you are running.  Look through bugtraq.  Read
the fedora test list and archives.  If possible do an upgrade to a
similarly configured box that is not production.  Then have a back out
plan documented and tested to get you back to where you started if
things go horribly wrong.  

Or you can roll the dice and execute an upgrade without doing any of
that and hope that it goes well.  I don't think an FC2 to FC3 upgrade
should be that bad, definitely not as risky as FC1 to FC2 was.  But
there could still be some issues that have not come out that may only
affect your particular hardware/package configuration.

For critical production systems you may really want to consider RHEL or
Whitebox Linux as they have a much longer support cycle.  Otherwise you
have to decide if upgrading is really worth the time, effort and risk. 
Just because you are still running FC1 does not mean it will stop
working next week.  You won't have the latest and greatest widget but
then for a production system you normally don't want or need the latest
and greatest.

And there is nothing wrong with running an older OS and installing your
own compiled versions of the latest applications such as apache,
postgresql, php, etc.  That way you can keep all your production
services up to date and patched without having to do a massive OS
upgrade.

-- 
Scot L. Harris
webid at cfl.rr.com

Q:	Why did the programmer call his mother long distance?
A:	Because that was her name.