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incognito2
Asked: 2011-08-14 08:08:17 +0800 CST

apt-get dist-upgrade on a production machine

  • 772

I have a couple of blogs running on an Ubuntu 9.04 machine and I'd like to upgrade it. Is it safe to do so?

Note, I also have a few daemons that were manually compiled like MySQL, Nginx, PHP, etc.

ubuntu upgrade

6 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    The only way to be really sure is to test. Create a test environment that mimics your production environment as closely as possible and then carry out the upgrades, monitor what happens and make a decision based on that.

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  2. dist-upgrade is extremely safe. I have dist-upgraded hundreds of production machines. I have systems running squeeze that were originally installed on sarge. I've executed apt-get dist-upgrade literally thousands upon thousands of times on production machines.

    That's not to say that it's guaranteed safe. I have encountered problems, but I can count those on one hand.

    That being said, you should always test your intended new deployment in a non-production environment first. Including testing the upgrade process.

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  3. I'd disagree with pepoluan's comment that it is never safe.

    It can be safe, and Ubuntu is far better at handling release upgrades than most other distributions I've handled. (You mention hand compiled software, that is where your trouble may lie).

    However in order to be confident in an answer you have to make a judgement call on what risk your willing to take -- and then test it. Never say "never" :-)

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  4. If you want to update your distribution running dist-upgrade will be the way to go. It will only update packages installed via apt-get or dpkg. It would not touch your manually compiled stuff. Also it would give you the summary before doing the job, so you could see it yourself.

    If you want to upgrade the Ubuntu version to newer one then you would have to run do-release-upgrade. I feel in your setup doing so would be risky. There are two ways to approach this task:

    1. do complete test as @lain says;
    2. reinstall your manually compiled packages via the package manager. Fix and verify your configuration. Then run do-release-upgrade or use the alternative CD upgrade option (personally I would to the latter).
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  5. Recommend a backup tool timeshift. If you are not sure about what you are going to do, you could backup your system first. timeshift allow you to back up your system hourly automatically.

    $ sudo apt install timeshift
$ sudo timeshift --create --tags H

    By the way, don't forget to modify the config file of timeshift.

    $ sudo nano /etc/timeshift/timeshift.json

    Otherwise, the backup won't be automatically.

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  6. I would not consider that a safe thing to do.

    Even with testing...how much testing are you going to do?

    I would migrate to a new server rather than trying to upgrade the existing. Using apt-get should make this fairly easy, assuming the blog platform doesn't have a ton of unusual dependencies.

    PS. I always avoid installing software that isn't packaged when possible. And for me, in my experience, it's always been possible.

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