Want ability to restore from failed upgrade.

[Jason Dixon]

On Feb 23, 2005, at 2:18 PM, Chris W. Parker wrote:

> Hello everyone,
>
> I am looking into upgrading a lot of the software (PHP, MySQL, 
> sendmail,
> Apache) on my 2 servers (RH8 and RH9) but I'm quite nervous about it.
> These are both production servers and I cannot afford to have the
> upgrades go south (probably because of lack of knowledge on my part) 
> and
> the servers stop functioning. One is a web server and the other handles
> email.
>
> What I'd like to do is make a backup of the entire filesystem (or
> whatever parts are necessary) that I can use to restore the failed
> upgrade back to a working state.

Stop right there.  Yes, you should have backups.  But don't rely on 
those solely as your backup in case of upgrade failure.  Your focus 
should be on building a test system and performing the upgrade there.  
Document and test everything.  Then proceed with your production system 
upgrade, referring to your documentation and, in the worst case 
scenario, restoring from the backups.

HTH.

--
Jason Dixon
DixonGroup Consulting
http://www.dixongroup.net