[chef] Re: Re: RE: RE: Re: Upgrade Ubuntu from 12.04 to 14.04

[Sean OMeara < >]

Never ever ever do in-place OS upgrades. Ever.

This is sysadmin-101 qualification exam level stuff.

Best case scenario, you end up with a machine in an unknown state,
where you find oddly broken things months down the line.

Worst case scenario, you lose your data. I had one incident Long Ago
(sarge to etch?), where a kernel update caused the PCI bus to scan in
the opposite direction, corrupting the software raid.

Re-baseline your machines in a test environment.

-s



On Mon, Apr 27, 2015 at 4:21 PM, Jason J. W. Williams
<
 >
 wrote:
> On Mon, Apr 27, 2015 at 1:12 PM, Mohammad Fattahian
> <
 >
>  wrote:
>> Understood. BTW is there any way to upgrade OS via Chef? Our recipes are 
>> not
>> that much OS oriented. I hope I can do an upgrade via Chef. Also we don’t
>> have enough resources to recreate the servers with 14.04 from scratch.
>
> I'd recommend investing your resources into making your cookbooks able
> to reprovision the servers from scratch rather than in trying to make
> Chef handle your Ubuntu upgrade. In my experience upgrading Ubuntu (or
> any distro) is asking for trouble later from mismatched dependencies
> and other driftwood left behind. Also, if your cookbooks can bootstrap
> a server from a base OS install, you'll be able to recover from server
> failures as an extremely useful benefit.
>
> We recently went through upgrading our cookbooks to be 14.04 friendly,
> which was relatively minimal effort.  Then we just provisioned new
> servers one at a time and took down the old ones.
>
> -J