Updating the kernel

[Soham Chakraborty]

Vladis, I hear ya and agree to that. Problem is I have seen big and by big,
I mean biggggggggg infrastructures asking for ksplice since certain sales
people of certain company introduced them to the utopia that is called
downtime-less-patching-and-upgrading. And obviously, if you have worked
with the CLI a bit less than most of us have already had, you get the sweet
inclination to go with sales and you know, voila.


On Tue, Nov 19, 2013 at 2:16 PM, <Valdis.Kletnieks at vt.edu> wrote:

> On Tue, 19 Nov 2013 09:48:27 -0500, Soham Chakraborty said:
> > I don't really think ksplice has garnered much love from upstream.
>
> The most common word used upstream to describe ksplice is "bletcherous".
>
> The reason it's disliked is because it's a poor solution for the problem.
> Although ksplice-like technology was used for years to upgrade telco
> switches on the fly, that was motivated by two major factors:
>
> 1) Nobody at a telco wants to drop dial tone while a switch reboots.
> 2) Telco switches are building-sized and expensive, so HA failover wasn't a
> realistic option.
>
> Although the first is still an issue for many sites, there's little or no
> justification in 2013 for the second.
>
> If you're in the sort of environment where you really need the sort of
> uptime
> that drive you to consider ksplice, you *really* should be doing load
> balancing and HA failover with heartbeats - that will not only allow you
> to actually reboot each server cleanly, but *also* protect you against
> blown
> DIMMs, crashed system disks, and all the *other* whoopsies that can cost
> you one or two nine's of reliability.
>
> Seriously - if you can't afford the downtime to reboot, youy can't afford
> *NOT* to be doing a full HA configuration - and possibly looking at
> geographic separation of the hot failover site.
>
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