On Tue, Nov 15, 2005 at 05:20:29PM -0500 or thereabouts, Paul Russell wrote:
> On 11/15/2005 16:31, Francoise Becker wrote:
> 
> >This is not correct, except for a bug on Solaris only that was fixed 
> >quite a while ago now. 
> 
> Can you provide any details about the "bug on Solaris only that was fixed
> quite a while ago now"?
> 
> >Maybe if you would upgrade to 14.4, you 
> >wouldn't have problems with X-SPAM jobs. At any rate, even if we were 
> >to make the changes to LISTSERV that you suggest, they won't do you 
> >any good if you never upgrade. ;-)
> 
> We host over 30,000 lists with approximately 1.5 millions subscribers, so
> it is not feasible to simply throw the latest release on top of a running
> production system, hope it works, and yank it back out if it doesn't. I am
> not implying that anyone on this list operates in that manner, but that is
> how your upgrade instructions read. Perhaps if you took the time to separate
> vendor-maintained files from locally-maintained files, upgrades would be
> easier. The last time we upgraded (from 1.8d to 1.8e), we encountered 
> serious
> performance problems which forced a roll-back. These problems did not 
> surface
> during a lengthy testing phase, because the test server had only a subset
> (10%) of the lists on the production server.

Wow, that's a lot of lists. I would tend to agree that the upgrade
process should be improved. When I took over maintainer duties a few
years ago, the idea of upgrading the server and having an unforseen
problem arise where I needed to revert back to the old server concerned
me. I decided to create a server filelist for the old and new servers.
I use this filelist to create tar files of the needed server files. When
I needed to revert, as I did when upgrading from 1.8d to 1.8e on AIX, I
just untarred the old server file and restarted. This has worked ok so
far, but I would prefer an L-Soft provided way to "back-out" an upgrade
if needed. I do think the move to the site template files was a good
improvement here.


> 
> --
> Paul Russell
> Senior Systems Administrator
> OIT Messaging Services Team
> University of Notre Dame

-- 
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Brian Bohlmann                CITES - Campus Information Technologies
University of Illinois                 & Educational Services
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