Brief Outages...

[Graeme Fowler]

On 29/06/2006 17:08, Just Marc wrote:
> Not always possible indeed, but if you can't afford a downtime of ONE 
> machine, something is wrong and that something needs to be fixed first.

Agreed (it's several years since I've built this sort of system with a 
SPOF at the director level); but there's an awful lot of posters who 
send mail to this list when they're only running one director - 
generally speaking nobody presumes to tell them they've got that wrong 
and should have two, as HA is a separate thing to LVS. Related, but 
separate.

> Debatable. People should know how to upgrade their kernels and should 
> keep current when the situation permits

Which is exactly what the OP (Hi, John) is doing in this case. Maybe 
he's had no reason to do so yet, but we'll let him answer that.

As for "People should know how to upgrade their kernels" etc., the 
necessity of keeping current depends on what you're doing. Continually 
updating a la Fedora, in many cases to get bugfixes in for things you 
won't ever use on a given system, is debatable. I've got boxes sitting 
doing jobs quite happily, locked down as hard as possible, which have 
run for several years without updates because they don't require them.

In the specific case we have here, the OP didn't know he needed a kernel 
update - in fact, until last year nobody did; patches were produced by 
Julian when the penny dropped that the ip_vs_ftp code was mangling 
persistence. It is interesting, though, that the Sarge kernel still 
doesn't contain the fixes. Ho hum.

Graeme