Re: [SAGE] Pros/Cons of complete rejumstart v.s. just patching OS images

["Melissa D. Binde" <binde@terindell.com>]

Twas brillig, on Fri Jan 04 at 05:01:03 PM, and Joseph Boyer Jr. burbled:

> Just wondering what people feelings are pertaining to patching the OS
> image or patching jump-start and than rejumpstarting the box.

We have a strong preference for re-installing the OS, because then you know
exactly what you're going to get if you ever need to re-create the machine
(because of an outage, or because you need one more of these.)

The disadvantage is you definitely have to take an outage, possibly a
protracted outage (depends on how long it takes to do the re-install); so if
you're not in an N+1 (or N+M) redundant configuration, this can be
impossible.

> 1. Would you handle servers and workstations differently?

If you can keep your user data on a different partition and avoid blowing
that away on re-install, then no, it's good to treat them the same way.

> 2. Dose anyone have a way of minimizing the reconfigure (after
> rejumpstart) time of a server, i.e. Dbase machines, print servers, mail
> hubs? 

We have a home-grown tool that manages all of our OS configurations (and
software installations, and accounts, and.... etc.), so this isn't a problem
for us (hence the big focus on re-installing whenever we can.)

cfengine is a good start for this sort of project.



-M.