what finally made your patching boring and predictable??

maintenanceoperationspatching12 replies · 408 views · started
  1. ok so we look after a dozen on-prem servers and patch monthly. management wants faster, the app owners want never on a weekday. im trying to desgin smth sane: staging rings, maintenance windows, auto-reboots or not. what actually works for you in practice?

    we have basic monitoring and backups, but no proper test enivronment that mirrors production. whatever process we pick has to work with that reality. id love to hear what cadence and safeguards people consider reasonable for a setup like ours. any ideas??

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  2. do you have a staging or canary group that mirrors production roles? ??

    thinking

    5 0 helpful
  3. ok so no real staging lmao A couple of test VMs that dont look much like a dozen on-prem servers.

    5 1 helpful
  4. ok but is maintenance even worth bothering with or should i just leave it 😂 +1 same here

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  5. ahh classic rings work: a small canary group patched first (including at least one server per role), then a wider group a few days later, then the rest, problems surface on servers that matter less. worked for me anyway 🤷

    thinking

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  6. ahh classic separate security updates from everything else. unattended security-only updates are fairly low risk on Debian/Ubuntu (unattended-upgrades with only teh security origin enabled), while feature updates go through teh window.

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  7. have u checked your on-prem settings?? mine were reset after an update xD this. sooo much this fingers crossed 🤞

    thumbsup

    15 1 helpful
  8. oh ive been there lol exact same thing hapepned to my mac last month worked for me anyway 🤷

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  9. reboots are teh hard part 😤 tools like needrestart (Debian/Ubuntu) or needs-restarting -r (RHEL family) tell you whether a reboot is actually required, sooo u only reboot when needed.

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  10. uhh wait does this also apply to monthly?... make a bacukp before u touch teh default config, learned that the hard way ??

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  11. track compliance, not intentions :) A simple report of last patch date and pending reboots per server shows which machines silently fell behind. worked for me anyway 🤷

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  12. ok so pro tip: write down what u change. i didnt and had to redo dozen from scratch

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  13. hmm idk counterpoint to rings: with a small 2,000 Windows devices, a single well-tested window may be simpelr than three groups to manage.

    facepalm

    2 14 helpful

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