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SLES 12 Service Pack upgrades on Azure

by | Dec 28, 2017 | evilzenscientist, Linux, patching

I’ve been bitten multiple times with the SLES service pack upgrade routine – with Red Carpet Enterprise (ouch – that’s a long time ago) and all of the various permutations of update tooling since.

Happy to say that SLES 12 SP1 to SLES 12 SP3 was zero fuss, fast and efficient. Less than five minutes per server on Azure and around 30 seconds of planned outage.

Good job SUSE team!

Windows Server 2012 Release Candidate

by | Jun 2, 2012 | Evangelism, Linux, patching, Uncategorized

The process and change control for the build/rebuild is pretty straight-forward now.

Updated the main archive server from Windows Server 2008 R2 to Windows Server 2012 Release Candidate. Looks great – some nice features – and it seems to be faster than the previous version.

Also this blog is hosted as a SUSE Linux web server running on top of Hyper-V on top of Windows Server 2012 RC. Performance is solid. No issues to date.

WordPress filesystem abstraction – and automatic updates

by | Jun 11, 2009 | patching, Uncategorized, wordpress

Way back in the not-so-distant past the only way to update WordPress was to download (wget/ftp) updates, plugins and themes, unpack them and perform the update/install.

It is possible to pull the latest builds from subversion – but that’s really focused on the core hacker.

New in WP 2.7 was the ability to update automatically.

There were a few challenges with this – permissions, PHP modules, various host implementations – but I found it generally quite successful.

I found a great FAQ here – http://dd32.id.au/2009/02/20/wordpress-filesystem-abstraction-faq/

From the same author is a very cool plugin – core-control – it lets you enable and disable various transports – and shows the status of them.