Stewart Dean wrote:
I think I mentioned this twice with little response by the DC community, but here goes a third time. I have things set up so that I can kill DC, swap in the new executables and restart DC, all in about 4 minutes or less. And if things go wrong, I can fall back just as fast. Users don't know that I've done anything (if the upgrade is good); I usually do it during lunchtime....so there shouldn't be a problem with doing it prime shift. So upgrade shouldn't be a big deal. Of course, I'm running a pretty vanilla DC install with no real plugin, no deliver, etc.
I use linux-vservers.
If you really want you can take a copy of the whole vserver, upgrade the copy, I map in the storage as a bind mount (but nfs, etc would work) and then you can test your new server.
When it works snapshot the old machine to be sure, upgrade the new machine and off you go.
Also vservers reboot really quick so if you ever get nervous that somthing is working right you have the option to bounce the whole vserver and make sure everything is fresh and it takes perhaps only a few seconds.
Also vservers are just a fancy way to do chroot's, so of course you can also strip your server down into lots of sandboxes, each running a single service, so bouncing one service could have very little impact on the rest of the whole installation
Also makes boosting the setup across to a new physical machine very easily also
Good luck
Ed W