Re: Am I an Idiot?

On Sunday 17 December 2006 07:07, Astrodog wrote:
> Something that, in my opinion, may have been missed in all of this,
>
> Why, exactly, do you want to run -CURRENT in production? As others have
> said above, its certainly possible to do. I've done it before myself, but
> always because of a specific feature, or bit of supported hardware, that
> didn't exist in -STABLE.
>
> Running -CURRENT is quite a bit more work than running -STABLE. The fact
> that a -CURRENT kernel and world can build and run on a test system, does
> little to indicate what type of performance, and stability you will see in
> a production environment. Many of the problems that may exist in -CURRENT
> will be induced by specific types of load. Race conditions, Lock Order
> Reversal, and certain driver issues in many cases, only appear under
> particularly heavy loads, or particular types of load.
> What this means, simply, is that when you test the next version of -CURRENT
> you'd like to run, there's quite a bit of testing you'll have to do. Along
> side this type of problem, is the issue of security. If you are running
> -CURRENT as of 2 weeks ago, and a security vulnerability is discovered, in
> some cases, you will be compelled to upgrade to the latest -CURRENT, even
> if it has known stability problems, or performance/functionality
> regression.
>
> None of this should be construed to imply that -CURRENT cannot be run in
> production, only that you really should have a compelling reason to do
> so... or at the very least, quite a bit of free time.

I agree with astrodog. I've been running FreeBSD since the first versions. I 
do run -CURRENT on my home machine, but I run 6-STABLE on my office servers. 
When you run -CURRENT you become a beta or worse an alpha tester. While I'm 
sure the development team would welcome your input, -CURRENT is NOT intended 
for production environments. I have dealt with many serious bugs in -CURRENT 
over the years up to the point where it sometimes wouldn't boot at all. While 
this is rare, it can jump up and bite you. Sometimes downloading sources an 
hour later makes the difference between boot/no-boot. If you do decide to 
run -CURRENT you should be prepared to do a lot of your own troubleshooting 
before posting to the list. Also, you should not blindly upgrade your server. 
You should try new versions on a test machine with similar hardware before 
updating your production server. While -CURRENT seems to be relatively stable 
right now, It's no guarantee it will remain that way. Astrodog was right in 
saying be prepared to spend a LOT of time, you most certainly will.

Beech

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