Urgent help needed: Licensing snafu following server crash

[Bill Campbell]

On Fri, Sep 21, 2007, Fairlight wrote:
>You'll never BELIEVE what Barry Wiseman said here...:
>> I do see that the yum daemon installed a new kernel (CentOS 4.5,
>> 2.6.9-55.0.2 -> 2.6.9-55.0.6) on Sep 4.  The post-crash boot would be the
>> first instance of the box running that new kernel.  Might fP's licensing
>> scheme have stumbled over that?
>
>My rule of thumb: *nix should -not- be auto-updated by an auto-scheduler.
>You just found out precisely why, and my experiences with SuSE's SP1 boot
>loader menu writing glitches are also an example (along with a few other
>oddities I've seen people run up against over the years).
>
>You might use, say, yast or up2date or whatever is on your system, but
>start it manually, under controlled circumstances, at a time of your
>choosing, when you can afford to take the time and roll things back,
>troubleshoot, etc.  And reboot after kernel patches when you can afford at
>least an hour downtime, giving yourself enough time to revert.

We build all systems with a partition identical in size to the
root partition, mounted on ``/backroot'' (but not automounted),
onto which we make a complete copy of the root file system with
only the /etc/fstab file modified so that the partitions for the
root and /backroot are reversed (/etc/default/filesys on OpenServer).
The boot menu allows one to boot into this partition as needed.

All data is on one or more other partitions.  We keep a copy of
the appropriate boot directory, /boot or /stand, on one of these
partitions where it's available using a live-cd if necessary.

Before doing any on-line update, we rsync the ``/'' partition to
`/backroot'', and test the boot just to be on the safe side.
This gives us a fall-back position if the update hoses the
system, and also may be useful if a machine is cracked.

Bill
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