Watch Out for Software Updates

Administrating a shared server is not the easiest thing to do. Half of the customers want to live on the bleeding edge and demand every new version of software to be installed right away. The other half is maybe running a commercial website and therefore more conservative regarding updates: “Do not ever upgrade X to the new version, it will break my site and will cost me millions of $”, they say slightly exaggerating.

So, what to do? We at TextDrive lean a bit to the bleeding edge side, but of course also care about more conservative customers. We are trying to find a way in between and most importantly give a heads up before we do major updates.

We installed a RSS feed for software updates and I recommend subscribing to it right now:

It will be used as the main communication channel for software updates. We will announce upcoming major software updates there and inform you when we did a smaller upgrade.

Next week, two big updates are coming:

·:· Posted 15 April 2006, 12:55 by Florian Munz to Web servers  |  

  1. Rails users should definitely be “freezing” their gems. i.e. putting a static set of approved and working gems into the rails application vendor folder using rake. Typo broke big time when Rails 1.1 rolled out. If you are conservative, just freeze your gems until you’ve had a chance to test the latest Ruby on Rails against your app. Rails is only going to go through more growth and change in the future.

    — Matt    15 April 2006, 14:41    #