On 06/09/2012 18:56, Ben Johnson wrote:
On 2012-09-05 6:20 PM, Ben Johnson ben@indietorrent.org wrote:
My configuration is Dovecot (1.2.9) + Sieve + SpamAssassin on Ubuntu 10.04.
1.2.9 is really old... you really need to upgrade to a recent/stable version. Thanks, Charles. I do see your point. One of the challenges we face in
On 9/6/2012 6:10 AM, Charles Marcus wrote: this regard is that we're using a Long-Term-Support version of Ubuntu (10.04) and 1.2.9 is the latest package in the OS's repository.
That said, we could upgrade manually, but this is a production server on which downtime must be minimized, and we all know how unexpected issues arise during installation (even when the procedure is tested in a closely equivalent development environment).
I personally use (lightweight) virtualisation on any new machine, I really don't see any reason why NOT to. I would typically also setup my mounts such that the operating system is separate from "the data". This makes it easy to upgrade the OS/services, but without touching the data (test before/after on the same data for example)
So in my situation I would boot a fairly small (gentoo in my case)
virtual environment that runs only dovecot + postfix, it mounts the mail
spools separately - I say "boot", but because I'm using linux-vservers,
it's really a fancy chroot, and so the instance will start in 2-3
seconds (restarts are similarly near instant). I would upgrade by
cloning this installation, upgrading it, testing it to bits, and then to
make it live basically you swap this "machine" for the live machine.
There are various ways it could be made near seamless, but in my
situation I can bear a couple of seconds whilst I literally restart the
"machine"
Similarly I segregate all my services into a dozen or so "virtual machines", so DNS has it's own "machine" and so does logging, databases, almost every webservice gets its own virtual environment, etc. You could use a full blown vmware/kvm/etc if that floats your boat better, but the point remains it's so trivial to install, makes upgrades to trivial and massively decreases your downtime risk that it's very hard to find a reason NOT to do it...
I haven't tried too hard to keep my instances tiny, so each is probably
around 400-600MB in my case. However, if it were important this could
easily be reduced to 10-100s MB each using various hardlink features.
As you can see it's easy to snapshot a whole machine to manage
upgrades/backups, etc
This is more about infrastructure, but I honestly can't get over how many people are sitting on their hands shackled by "I'm on Debian xxx and I can't install any software newer than 5 years old"... It's so easy to escape from that trap...!!
Good luck
Ed W