Upgrade Pains
Yesterday I learned a lesson the hard way. I upgraded a “production” system (My home MythTV box) to the latest testing version of Debian and suffered numerous small failures. The knock on effects ment the MythTV system was unavailable for recording for about five hours, much to the fustration of the other half.
The idea came to me at first when I spotted that MythTV 0.22 has been released and maybe it was time to upgrade to get up to speed, of course I didn’t read through the new features list or check out what was happening in the world of MythTV. As it turns out, nothing changed that affected me or improved the situation . I did a senseless upgrade when I didn’t need to.
So, from now on i’ll follow a simple checklist:
- Do you need to upgrade? Will it fix a bug or a ongoing issue?
- Do you REALLY need to upgrade? Will the upgrade fix a world shattering issue?
- No, DO YOU REALLY NEED TO UPGRADE?
Production systems usually run old software for a reason, I learned that today.
Ha Ha….from someone who daily pains are about sorting out the shit from stuff going into production systems, can I add:
1. Buy some more hardware so you have two production like environments- one for Dev and one for QA
2. Apply the upgrade to Dev first and check for any immediate tech bugs
3. Apply to QA and perform a full end to end integration test and get the other half to sign it off
4. Agree when to apply the upgrade to Production; in this case when you customer is not expecting to record/watch anything critical.
5. Agree the back out strategy should it all go wrong
Simples…..
Paul Roberts
17 Nov 09 at 9:09 pm
Did you schedule the maintenance outage during a change window? Then she can’t complain…
Kyle Maxwell
17 Nov 09 at 9:31 pm