[hobbit] risks of using 4.3 snapshot in production?

[Henrik Stoerner]

On Mon, Jan 14, 2008 at 10:09:51AM -0500, Tom Georgoulias wrote:
> I'm about to upgrade the OS on my production hobbit server and was 
> considering using a 4.3 snapshot instead of my usual 4.2 setup.  I've been 
> experiencing a memory leak with hobbitd_rrd in 4.2 that was caused when I 
> applied the split-ncv patch last year, and it'd be nice to pick up the fix 
> that is already in 4.3.  The 4.3 snapshots I've tested seem ok, but the 
> data set they are working with is much smaller than my prod server uses.  
> Looking over the change logs on the hobbit demo site, it seems like snmp is 
> where most of the devel work is happening and everything else is unchanged. 
>  We don't need hobbit for snmp right now, so I'm ok if that part doesn't 
> work.

It's a bit more risky then running the 4.2 release, but I am reasonably
sure that the current snapshot is in a pretty good state. As you've
noticed, SNMP handling is where most of the work has gone these past
weeks. The rest of Hobbit hasn't changed a whole lot - so it has been
running 24x7 in my backup/staging environment (this gets the same
traffic as my production setup - which is quite a lot) for a couple of
months now.

And since I need the SNMP stuff for production use, I'll probably
prepare an "alpha" release next week and put that on my production
system.


> Is there a list of outstanding bugs that I can look over?

No.

> And of course, the obvious--is this a stupid idea?

The one big issue with running a bleeding-edge version is that if/when
you hit some bug, the first response from me will probably be "try
installing todays snapshot". So You might have to do more upgrades to
keep up with the development, which could mean that your Hobbit system
is down occasionally while you upgrade and perhaps tweak the config
settings that need fixing.

>From my perspective, it would be great to have more people running the
snapshots in live environments - it's a great way to test the new code
and find bugs.


Regards,
Henrik