> Your concerns are not an issue with a distro like Debian
Ten years ago, I had a Debian server completely wedge itself on an update. glibc was hosed, practically nothing would run, and I couldn't untangle the mess. Had it been unattended, downtime would have been even longer than the hours it took to rebuild the box from scratch.
This was not the first or last time such an event would occur, merely the most severe.
Updates break things. Anyone who claims otherwise is either incredibly lucky, or incredibly inexperienced.
But if you can't flip a switch to deploy an identical server and/or restore from a backup image, aren't you in deep shit anyway? Your failure plan is to rebuild the box from scratch?
For a one-off budget server in 2002-2003? Yes, yes it is.
For a highly-available mission-critical infrastructure in 2013, the failure plan is also to rebuild from scratch, because "failure" means redundant and backup systems have exploded. This is most likely to occur when you automatically roll out untested changes to your infrastructure.
In either case, you won't be sleeping tonight. Or possibly tomorrow night.
Ten years ago, I had a Debian server completely wedge itself on an update. glibc was hosed, practically nothing would run, and I couldn't untangle the mess. Had it been unattended, downtime would have been even longer than the hours it took to rebuild the box from scratch.
This was not the first or last time such an event would occur, merely the most severe.
Updates break things. Anyone who claims otherwise is either incredibly lucky, or incredibly inexperienced.