Web Hosting Talk : Web Hosting Main Forums : Dedicated Server : I just updated my kernel

[dollar]

I am here mainly to brag. I do not post very often, but I am a long time lurker of the shadows. I just did my first remote kernel update and I must say it was a lot easier that I felt it would be. It took a total of around 15 minutes to complete. I used an RPM instead of compiling from source. (This is not a production server with any clients mind you). What I was curious about was problems people have had with updating their kernel remotely? From time to time the kernel has to be updated for security reasons, even on a live machine. What can go wrong?

[BitError]

Congratulations

Many things can go wrong, the most suspenseful of course are after a reboot waiting for the machine to come back up. One of the few times you can appreciate having a quality provider however, as it's important to have hands at the datacenter in case you make a mistake on configuration and the system doesn't properly reboot.

More complex RAID configs tend to add to this complication, although it really depends on what distro you are using. For me personally it has been years since I had a machine not come back up, the times it did happen however it was never a fun ordeal.

[dollar]

I must admit after I hit that scary enter key with the word "reboot" on the screen, it was a mad dash to open up the command prompt and start pinging until I recieved a reply. On a side note, when I used up2date, I recieved quite a few RPM packages that range from XFree86 all the way to PHP, is it a good idea to go through and update all of those packages that are related to the system (xWindows is not needed on my box, I know that packages like that should be skipped). For example, PHP was one of the packages that was not up to date. If I upgrade PHP will I run into problems with people relying on an older more widely used version of PHP? I know with PHP5 comming out, it is not exactly backwards compatible.

[sirius]

Originally posted by justadollarhostin
I am here mainly to brag. I do not post very often, but I am a long time lurker of the shadows. I just did my first remote kernel update and I must say it was a lot easier that I felt it would be. It took a total of around 15 minutes to complete. I used an RPM instead of compiling from source. (This is not a production server with any clients mind you). What I was curious about was problems people have had with updating their kernel remotely? From time to time the kernel has to be updated for security reasons, even on a live machine. What can go wrong?

Congrats.... nice work!

Sirius

[PogiWeb]

A job well done justadollarhostin. Keep it up and those kernels updated. hehehe